Monday, August 12, 2013

Sailing the High Seas of Spam Piracy

No, this post isn’t about hijacking trucks coming out of Hormel’s canning plants.What I’m on about is the latest referral spam to visit Blogger’s stats for From the Sidelines, http : // getfilesme . com / UPDATED 19 Oct 2013 to include filesw8 . com

getfilesme spam 01

filesw8 Spam

 

First off, don’t click on the referral if you see it, there is no point in feeding the spammers and associating yourself with piracy if the government comes snooping around on behalf of the entertainment industry. You also don’t know what you could catch from visiting such sites since they are a favorite way to spread trojans, keyloggers, and all sorts of malware. In other words, don’t try this at home kids.

UPDATE: A nearly identical site showed up today as filesw8 . com and I have no doubt it is put up by the same people. Stay away from it too.

When I went investigating, the link took me on a voyage to the high seas of piracy. Movies, music, TV shows, and expensive software filled three lists on the page. Aha, it is a warez site, or place to download security cracked versions of software for “free” if you sign up.

getfilesme spam 02

I clicked on on one to check it out and found what appeared to be a professionally organized layout was actually pretty shoddy. Status is misspelled as “satus” which is an indication they may have ripped and copied another pirating site using automated scripts. Pirates are cutthroats and backstabbers after all. Also, the wrong description is another giveaway things aren’t quite right.

getfilesme spam 03

Clicking on the “Trusted” download link took me to a different domain, downloadprovider . me

Notice the big “SIGN UP” icon up in the right hand corner. There’s always a catch. Well I didn’t bother to check that out because the vast majority of sites like to charge you or try to get you to pay for faster download speeds at this point. I sincerely doubt this one is any different. After all, there has to be money involved at some point if you are spamming and there are no ads to be seen.

So ended my excursion. It appears the same wide range of spam seen in emails and comments is working its way into referral spam.

2 comments:

sher said...

so I am thinking that myth-weavers.com and fiercetelecom.com are probably spam too huh?

It's funny how they are now making these things go to real looking pages.

Patrick D. Boone said...

Sherry - Myth-Weavers looks pretty legit to me from the activity on the forums and content. Looks like a lively community of dedicated RPG players there. Minimal ads, links all go to real things, so I'd say somebody linked to you for real from there.

Fierce also appears to be a real site using the aggressive multi-domain approach to maintain search engine presence. That's something some webmasters are moving too in order to remain competitive in Google's rankings. It's a sort of shotgun approach to make sure you show up more in searches.

Twitter activity is high, Linked In resumes for the editors, and sponsored papers show it to be real.