The spamming circle-jerk
I have written about the new type of comment spam. Someone will register at an online forum, create an identity and use that forum to post advertisements for pills, pr0n and casinos (although there is not that much online gambling these days). The fora they choose are poorly moderated so posts like these can have lifetimes of several weeks to indefinitley.
The script kiddies then try to make big bucks by posting links to these forums in comments to a blog.
When these came out a few months ago, they got moderated and blocked as they already tripped a few red flags in my system. When I saw what was happening, I wrote an additional set of rules to look specifically for these - a few lines of PERL maintaining a flat file of URLs, nothing fancy. Not a coder...
What I love so much about this latest batch of spammers is that they are trying to post links for many corrupted forums in one blog comment so if their post trips up on one URL,
I can often harvest ten or more other brand new URLs to watch for.
These idiots are mixing stale and new forums in their scripts and by doing this, they are effectively poisoning their new fora as I will now know to look for them as well.
How pervasive is this problem? I now have a list of 167 unique URLs that are spam related. I received two comment attempts this afternoon, both of which were blocked by an older URL but combined, they added 17 brand new URLs to my watch list.
FSCKING IDIOTS!
In history, there are stories of mighty warriors wailing out their cris de coeur, bemoaning that there were no worthy opponents. In my own small way, I feel the same. I am playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of mouth breathing script-kiddies who live in their Mom's basement.
Certainly, there is a perverse fun to be had in my Odyssey. I am smarter than they are. I will confess to a small thrill up the leg when code written by an avowed non-programmer and hardware junky beats them down to the mud and steals their lunch money.
These people are by no means intelligent. Being able to consistently rack up high scores on a computer game is not an indicator of intelligence. It means that the player has the idiot/savant ability to second-guess and memorize the game designers story arc. If these people are so intelligent, why are they still living in their Mom's basement and sending out spam.
SPAM is the Carbuncle on the ass of the Internet. The Internet is an amazing construct with (almost) a life of its own. Unfortunately, there are people whose chosen purpose in life is to take a dump in the town square. They then look around and notice all the people pointing at them and they think: Ohhhh Look! Everyone is looking at Meeeeeeee!!!
Arrrggghhhhhhh...
Posted by DaveH at May 23, 2009 10:00 PM