Saturday, July 20, 2013

Time for Some Polish Comment Spam

One of the best reasons to enable Recaptcha aka the oddly colored and jumbled letters in the comments form is the fact you will very quickly see spam show up in your comments if you don’t. I moderate every post and had done this to save time though it does stop real people from commenting due to frustration deciphering the text.

To make it easier for people to post, I disabled the Turing test last night. At 2:17 AM this morning, the following arrived in my mailbox (edited to defeat autolinking):

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Godzilla vs Biollante (1989)":
[ url = http : // www . page1 . pl] pozycjonowanie [/ url ]

Needless to say, that looked suspicious sort of like a masked man robbing a bank does. Firing up the trusty virtual Ubuntu machine, I investigated the link which led to a very professional looking site put up by a company called Arteria.

page1 spam 01page1 spam 02

It’s a rather large page involving a lot of scrolling, so I present only the top and bottom of the content. I’ve edited out the actual contact information which includes an address in Krakow, Poland.

Courtesy of Google Translate, the opening text in English:

page1 spam 03

As you have probably guessed, they are selling something. In this case, SEO optimization and placement. What’s SEO? Search Engine Optimization. That’s why they are spamming websites, hoping to get someone wanting higher traffic to pay them for their services.

If you are a webmaster or blog owner, do not click on this and feed their shady practices.

UPDATE: Turns out I missed another comment spam from a mere hour or two after I disabled the robot check. What’s hilarious here is that the link goes to a page that no longer exists:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)":
When some one searches for his essential thing, so he/she wants to be available that in detail, thus that thing is maintained over here.
My weblog: southwest florida art galleries

atlcurling . info / wiki / index.php?title = User: JZFLourde

Once these spambots are set loose they seem to keep going long after the site is dead. I wonder how much zombie spam is out there?

No comments: