perkonis

Yesterday mixed in with my normal run of spam I saw something that made me stop and laugh. A spambot actually apologized for what it was about to do. It started out “Sorry for this” and then proceeded to post a dozen links. And then it did it 5 more times.

I guess it’s the thought that counts.

Ah, comment spam. The everlasting quest for a clickthru or, even better, the sacred backlink. I look through the garbage that Askimet catches and shake my head. They aren’t even trying anymore. It’s just brute force. Throw a dozen comments out there with twenty or thirty links in it and see what sticks. Where’s the finesse? Where’s the ingenuity? Well last night I found it. Or rather it found me.

I posted this story to Digg. In a short time, I noticed the story had one comment posted to it. I opened the comment section and found a bit of creative comment spam. The comments are gone now, but I did get a screenshot.

Someone cleverly got there bot to grab the username from the story posting and generate a link to the Oh So Cute website. I looked at the profile for this user ikffhf (which is now deleted) and saw that the bot was posting similar comments to other stories. Always grabbing the username of the original poster and generating a link to the fake newspaper. I have seen the same trick on a couple of blogs this morning as well.

So on this one, I am going to have to give the spammer a +1 for creativity. But I’m still going to give them a -1,000,000 for spam.

I installed Coppermine on my site a few weeks ago. I just wanted to try it out to get a feel and see if it was something I really wanted to use. Since I didn’t really have much of a purpose in mind, I left most of the settings at their default, uploaded a few pics I had floating around, and pretty much ignored it for a couple of weeks figuring I would get around to finding a use for it some day.

One of the features of Coppermine is the ability for users to rate the pictures and add comments. Sounds like good idea in theory. Theory and real world application, as usual, don’t agree. The default setting is to allow anyone and anything to posts comments and this is where things got interesting. Somehow a bot herder found my little site that gets next to zero traffic. Unfortunately I hadn’t ever gotten around to installing any kind of analytics code in the gallery so I wasn’t able to get much detail on what happened next.

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