What is a comment spammers modus operandi?

September 20, 2006 8:31 AM

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. -- Sun Tzu I get a lot of blog spam on my website and it got me thinking; if I am to fight it more effectively I need to learn more about it. How is it actually sent, what software or scripts do people use, and where do these people hang out on the Internet?

I don't need any information on how to fight comment spam (I can do that just fine) or why they do it (for links and $$$). But any info and the technical aspects of spamming would help me learn about the enemy.

posted by maxpower to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I just finished reading SPAM KINGS and it cited some of the different programs used and some of the places on the web the spammers hang out. It was a nice light read and kind of informative but probably not as technical as you may looking for as far as a single source of information.
posted by Raymond Marble at 9:08 AM on September 20, 2006

They write scripts that crawl the web, starting with targetted sites (e.g. Google "comments") and/or by following every link they find. Then they look for forms. They put their spam in every form they find and submit. Some are more choosy about which forms to use, but the cost is so low that they can afford to submit everything. Such a script can be written in five minutes, so there's not much standardization around the specifics.
posted by scottreynen at 9:39 AM on September 20, 2006

Best answer: I'd imagine that particular scripts look for copyright taglines and version numbers for blog software so that they know form field names and the like for proper automated comment submission.

Hacking scripts must do this to find unpatched versions of software out there with known exploits.
posted by thanotopsis at 10:02 AM on September 20, 2006

Best answer: Spamhuntress stays on top of stuff like this.
posted by brownpau at 10:08 AM on September 20, 2006