Friday, July 12, 2013

Old Spam Is Still Indigestible

Getting back to posting reviews is turning out to be harder than I expected and the new rounds of referral spam have taken up time meant for writing on other topics. The latest to hit by Blogger stats is from newsuc . com and according to DuckDuckGo it is a parked domain which means no real content is hosted there. The page showing up from this dedicated to spamming site is newsuc . com / blog / blog1 . php / 2009 / 07 / 20 /giant-quake-tsunami though there are several others at the site.

newsuc spam 01

I fired up my virtual machine (VM) running Ubuntu for safe investigation of the site and to take screen captures. Remember, don’t click on the links from newsuc! What I found looked like a real blog, if out of date by three years. But why would they be linking me now?

newsuc spam 02

Scrolling down the page to the comments revealed why. This is a dedicated spammer site filled with thousands of links in the comments of each article. The articles were probably “scraped” from legitimate sites in the first place and the comment spam posts are the only comments!

newsuc spam 03

The last article posted doesn’t even have quite as high a quality spam comments. Lots of social engineering went into the previous ones and the text content was probably lifted from real comments on forums and Facebook.

By the way, I never found my blog actually linked anywhere in the articles or comments. This is typical of referral spam – they never actually link to you. It appears the host site B2evolutionis legitimate but like Blogspot allows spammers to build blogs there.

So beware of links from newsuc . com!

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