It seems to be a week of heavy traffic in Blogger referral spam and I wish there was a diet we could go on to lose it. The latest links to a video from a chiropractor and “wellness expert” calling himself Dr. Charles from Fishers, Indiana.
current . com / 1rhh7kc is the link showing up today, but it has also been showing up in large quantities as www . filmhill . com / redirect . php?url=http:// flf-course . com?a_aid=510d2acc92117&a_bid=6f93443e for some time now.
UPDATE 1: Now it is coming as vk . com / away . php?to=http %3A%2F%2Fflf-course . com%2F%3Fa_aid%3D51893d1ad4b02&post=18068744_31
UPDATE 2: Once again the link has changed, this time to appear to be coming from LinkedIn. www . linkedin . com / redir / redirect?url=http %3A%2F%2F flf-course %2Ecom%3Fa_aid%3D517d0f042c205&urlhash=e75j
UPDATE 3: As of June 26, 2013 a new link has appeared: http:/ /t . co/ MaAptuGFVu that is of course the same video.
UPDATE 4: July has found the video making its way into referrals again, this time as blogsrating . pw/ An interesting thing happened when I loaded the site – it ran a very long load with many blogspot addresses going by in the info bar of the browser. I’m no code expert, but I wonder if it uses every hit on the site to send further referral spam hits to our blogs.
Also, it appears to be using Russian resources, surprise, surprise.
Screen capture of the Current version:
Screen capture of the Filmhill version:
Yep, it’s the same thing with only the sidebar being different.
I should also note I had to “hard” shutdown my virtual Kabuntu session to get out of the second link. Whether that has something to do with my video card drivers or the site I can’t say, but I don’t advise visiting the sites. Besides it’s just another scam to get money out of you.
6 comments:
I figured out the film hill one pretty quick and learned not to click The second one only started showing up after film hill gave up - I search the web site so I could learn about it and not click on it first - So thanks because I wanted to know but not click LOL
Glad to be of help!
Hi Patrick,
I'm getting much of the same, so I checked with the folks at google/blogger help forums. Their advice was to never, ever click on those links.
They said that the more you click on the referral spam URLs in your stats, the more spam you get. The most disturbing part,is that you are significantly increasing the risk of inviting a virus or nasty malware onto your hard drive. When you go to that site, it allows the spammers to leave a backlink on your computer. I'm pretty sure that's why you had to do a manual shutdown from that one page.
I can usually tell when a URL is spam, but if I'm not sure, I do the same thing that "Journey of the god Ta" (above) does. I type the URL into the search bar and look at the hits that result from it. More often than not, I'll see that other bloggers are talking about getting the same spam. (that's how I found you!)
Just wanted you to know about the dangers of clicking on those links. Take care and have a great weekend!
Mary - Thank you for the comment, I should be a little more clear on the dangers of clicking these links. After writing too many posts on the subject, I simply forgot too.
Be assured that I take many precautions against malware with the biggest being checking these out in a virtual machine so that my main operating system and hardware cannot be accessed. Yeah, it's a nerdy way to go about it, but it allows me to document the sites without jeopardy. Most people should simply avoid them unless they really understand security well.
Thanks for the information. My blog is also effected by these spammers. Is there any way to get out of this trap?
Birdy - I'm afraid not, they hit new blogs as soon as they are created and it's all automated. The best way to deal with it is to ignore it by using Google Analytics or StatCounter to track visits instead of the Blogger stats.
Google isn't keen on playing whack-a-mole with spammers since they move their spam spreading from server to server on a regular basis.
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