Spamming and the laws of unintended consequence

About an hour ago, I got two attempts at comment spamming. Those of you who read this blog know that I really really hate spam and think that people who spam are scum. And this is insulting a lot of really wonderful scum. One of the attempts was using the hijacked public forum style of spamming. Someone will register at a newspaper or an online forum and then proceed to post links to PPC sites (pills, pr0n, casinos). They then try to post comments to various blogs linking to these fora. The one tonight was to an address that I already know about and was blocked. The second one was for what I am now calling "random tracker spam". These will lead off with four to six random alphabetic characters, a space and then a couple of gibberish URLs. My guess is that these are posted to "seed" a likely blog and that other bots will search for these initial seeds and start spamming those blog posts. What makes today a wonderful event is that these ID-10-Ts altered their approach. They inserted a few punctuation marks into their seed -- I was not testing for this and it would have slipped by and been approved and posted but for one tiny item... ??? The machine they used was already listed at zen.spamhaus.org as being a known spamming system. That flipped the comment into moderation where I could see the change and re-write the regex to accommodate their new strategies. Easy-Peasy. I take great delight in dealing with these mouth-breathers. My programming language is solder. I do hardware. I do not code. I am a piss-poor programmer. I have no code fu. You can ask any random person on the street and their code-fu will be better than mine. Still... Out of the last 500 or so attempts, I have probably had 20 successes and these are incorporated into the script that I use to eliminate future spams of this nature. At the end of the day, these people are simply not that smart. Their code certainly is not effective. They do not learn from their mistakes. When they try, they do not validate their machines. Can you say:

LOOSER!

I knew you could... Posted by DaveH at May 30, 2009 7:47 PM