Remember when making icons for apps was all the rage? You don’t?! Well, a flood of referral spam to my Blogger site has filled me with nostalgia for the Windows 3.1 era of the early 1990s. All of the following spam traces back to Aha-soft in Canada as the screen captures will show.
Remember never to click on strange referral links showing up on Blogger stats. Leave that to crazy people like me armored up with security, virtual PCs, and anonymous web browsing capabilities.
The spam deluge began with http: // www . badaicons . com/ which leads to a page selling icons for Samsung smartphone apps. Clearly this is aimed at developers creating apps rather than end users.
Digging deeper into the links, it turns out the pages are part of a larger site, www . aha-soft . com, with redirects galore from their many domain names. They appear to be a real company out of Vancouver, Canada selling royalty free icon libraries plus software to view and create them.
When the next link rolled in, it was obvious a theme was developing. http: // blog . xshock . de / tools / 20 / icon-editors looks like a real blog and clicking around it confirms the impression. Defunct since 2008, the creator still maintains a presence elsewhere. So why is this page being spammed?
The last review, the shortest one on a plug in for Photoshop, answers this.
That looks like a familiar layout, does it not? Aha-soft again is the destination under a different domain name of www . sibcode . com. I can’t say whether the blogger was paid to have the link on his blog or simply got used by Aha-soft for cover when they decided to start spamming. Either way, his old blog is part of it now.
Next up is http: // www . gfx4you . com / 32968-sib-icon-editor-v512 . html which takes you to a software piracy site. Once again an Aha-soft product is the focus of the page, in this case Sib icon editor. They have other products on the sketchy website too and my suspicions are they uploaded their products themselves.
To give you an idea of how dangerous following referral links can get, check out the above comment from another pirated piece of software. Viruses and trojans often are inserted into illegal copies of programs, games, and utilities found on this kind of site.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANYTHING FROM THERE.
http: // coolpict . blog.com / appeared in my referrals next and that page is a lazy attempt at a fake blog. Of course the links in it leads to Aha-soft sites such as www . 777icon . com and www . perfect-icons . com.
Pricey stuff, but I suppose that royalty based graphics adds up over time making this an appealing deal to programmers.
http: // iconeditor . blog . com / arrived and by this time I knew who was behind it before I even bothered to check it out. While it has more posts than the previous fake blog, everything links back to Aha-soft sites again, except for the dead link www . iconsforwindows8 . com. This time around posts on random subjects have been inserted to fool Google and others into thinking the site is legitimate.
Then another fake blog turned up http: // webicons . blog . com / which led to more Aha-soft sites: www . pixelledesigns . com www . toolbar-icons . com www . large-icons . com www . ordericon . com.
I have to wonder how many domain names belong to Aha-soft. There have to be more than just the ones investigated in this post.
Ordericon is a little different than the others in that it doesn’t hew to the same template and looks like something out of early days of the Web.
http: // www . iconcreator . info/ is yet another fake blog using some of the same random posts as iconeditor. Something weird happened when I took the screen capture, that black square outline was not present on the monitor at all.
At least http : // www . icongratis . com / looks different. Of course it still is a front for Aha-soft’s sites with the blue template via www . vista-style-icons . com.
No such subterfuge with http : // www . iconutils . com / since it goes straight to an Aha-soft branded page.
Finally, http: // www . standard-icons . com / confirms that saturation bombing is Aha-soft’s preferred method of marketing. This shotgun approach to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been around a good long while despite efforts to stamp it out. Personally, I hope they go out of business because I used to like custom icons and this experience has made them toxic to me for awhile!
This kind of thing should be trashed.
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