Sifting through the list of web pages in Brandwatch that have been reported as spam, you get a feel for the ever-changing ways that spam merchants manage to infect the web with junk.
They used to just redirect browsers to their own hosted spam sites – but we could blacklist the entire site and filter out all the pages. Next, legitimate sites were hacked and hijacked to store the spam content, exploiting weaknesses in certain webservers. Many of these we filter out using tell-tale patterns in the hijacked page address. The latest trend seems to be hijacking a range of sites, embedding the spam content from one server inside pages served by another.
It’s an arms race: the spam merchants are always looking for new techniques to push spam in front of people’s eyeballs, trying to bypass the approaches used to thwart them. If you’re crawling the web for content, then you’re obliged to play this game. Personally, I have a grudging admiration for the other side – they’re certainly good at finding new ways to promote junk.
Ultimately, spam only exists because spammers can make good money from promoting their wares. Which means that, somewhere out there, enough people actually click through to the spam sites and choose to pay for the junk on offer. If only we could filter them out…
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Arms And The Spam
June 16th, 2008. Posted by Tim OwenSifting through the list of web pages in Brandwatch that have been reported as spam, you get a feel for the ever-changing ways that spam merchants manage to infect the web with junk.
They used to just redirect browsers to their own hosted spam sites – but we could blacklist the entire site and filter out all the pages. Next, legitimate sites were hacked and hijacked to store the spam content, exploiting weaknesses in certain webservers. Many of these we filter out using tell-tale patterns in the hijacked page address. The latest trend seems to be hijacking a range of sites, embedding the spam content from one server inside pages served by another.
It’s an arms race: the spam merchants are always looking for new techniques to push spam in front of people’s eyeballs, trying to bypass the approaches used to thwart them. If you’re crawling the web for content, then you’re obliged to play this game. Personally, I have a grudging admiration for the other side – they’re certainly good at finding new ways to promote junk.
Ultimately, spam only exists because spammers can make good money from promoting their wares. Which means that, somewhere out there, enough people actually click through to the spam sites and choose to pay for the junk on offer. If only we could filter them out…