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Thursday, September 13, 2012

An Impressive Bit of Socially Engineered Blog Spam

Going through my email account revealed a comment waiting to be approved. While posted from that ever witty pseudo being, Anonymous, it looked legit at first before going off the rails:
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.
You definitely know what youre talking about, why
waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when
you could be giving us something enlightening to read?
Look at my homepage ... free porn
No video on the post is a wee bit of a giveaway even before the pornography offer (link deleted by me). Misspelling is no longer a surefire indicator that something is spam, so that can be forgiven. The idea of using constructive criticism as a form of social engineering in spam is a new one to me. I know it made me read the entire thing, so I bet this one is fairly effective.
Fiendishly clever is the phrase that applies, methinks.

UPDATED

Meanwhile, the Russian referral spam continues unabated. This time it is one from super-online-search . com that takes you to a site you do not want to visit.The Huns are at the gates, I tell you.

UPDATED 9-13-2012

A comment for another post is another clever variation of this that turned out to be a way to get clicks on a “survey” site as well as the video.

I'm having this exact problem with the video: http://www.youtube.com/(removed by me)  I've put one comment on the video site, but Youtube won't let me link your post as part of the explanation. So far, you are the only post that has tried to make sense of this stupid spam issue. Thanks for posting!

The identity of the commenter was “Ron” but the link to his profile is the afore mentioned survey at sprezzaturarrd . blgospot . com. Interesting development because it looks like they are aware of people trying to spread the word. Notice how the video gets another hyperlink via the comment?

Sadly they did get a couple of clicks out of me verifying the profile, but somebody has to take a look to see what is going on to warn others.

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