We all notice the spam that hammers our referral statistics on Blogger’s control panel. But there is spam that only hits once or twice and is only seen if you are there at the right time. A couple of cases of these “drive-by” spammers were seen by me this week and you couldn’t get any different in what they were promoting.
First, one that hit today: http : // girlswithglasses . blognet . pw /
This happens to be hosted on blogger but with a name like that I was suspicious and fired up my virtual machine. Sure enough, it is a porn site looking to make money off of clicks. Do not click! Needless to say, there won’t be a screen capture.
The other one was suspicious since it looked like it was masquerading as a legitimate site: http: // quitcoal . org / node / add
Well, it is a legit site. This is a Greenpeace run anti-coal page and it appears someone was trying to make people who clicked on the link automatically join the petition/site. Of course that’s an error message you see in the screen shot, so that forced recruitment failed.
Political referral spam, this is a first in my experience. I’m sure the individual responsible felt righteously motivated and justified in saving the planet. However, a policy of the ends justifying the means always leads into darkness and soon the would be do-gooder is a force of evil rather than good. In other words, a spammer.
By the way, I included the entire virtual machine window to show off my new way of flirting with disaster (cue Molly Hatchet) – checking out sites with Windows XP. The installation is setup to be roughly what an average user would have in the way of security to see what kind of nasty infections I can get from these sites. It’s actually a clone of a clean installation too, so I can do this without any hassle of reinstalls.
2 comments:
So if I were to install an new security system, say Kaspersky, should this technophobic geek take it to best buy and have them wipe it all down before hand? Or will a new installation clean up as it goes along.
Hey! I said technophobic. I'm lucky I can find the enter button most days. ;)
Sherry - I don't recommend Best Buy since I've had to fix their screwups on too many people's computers. Normally an installation is easy, but it involves a lot of rebooting the PC and scanning. Just about every AV out there scans the system during and after an installation.
Kaspersky is a good choice in a paid AV. Norton and McAfee are nearly worthless.
I also recommend Avast which is free for home users if you register it annually. It's my favorite AV and I've been using it for years. It can be found at http://www.avast.com/
One of the best for technophobes is Microsoft's free Security Essentials http://windows.microsoft.com/mse/
I'm currently using this on my Windows 7 main PC and one of its virtual machines. It is the easiest to install and use.
This is all assuming you have a Windows PC of course!
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