New slimy spammer junk

[altivo]

Remember when you used to get tons of spam trying to sell you CD-ROMs full of "valid" e-mail addresses for spamming? And then later, they were trying to get you to buy software that would automatically generate and ship off the spam?

Well, here's a new one, pushing software to "blast" advertising onto millions of blogs, including, no doubt, LJ. If you ever wondered why people screen comments from non-friends-list, here's one good reason.


From - Mon Sep 10 14:14:41 2007
X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: 1189451130.3626.webmail.********
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Return-Path: <*****************fake address in Romania>
Delivered-To: *****************my work address
Received: (qmail 3620 invoked by alias); 10 Sep 2007 19:05:30 -0000
Delivered-To: *******************
Received: (qmail 3591 invoked from network); 10 Sep 2007 19:05:29 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO rdslink.ro) (222.162.139.113)
by webmail.********* with SMTP; 10 Sep 2007 19:05:29 -0000
Reply-To: ***************fake address in Romania, right...
From: BlogBlaster
To: ****************
Subject: Automatically create thousands of links to your website
Date: 11 Sep 2007 02:24:51 -0700
Message-ID: <20070911022446.7F7420F5FE7AE679@from.header.has.no.domain>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Spam-Rating: webmail.********* 1.6.2 0/0/N

"How would you like to have your ad on 2 Million Websites ?"

I'm not pulling your leg!
Discover the new way of advertising on the Internet!
This Tool is one of the hottest - if not the hottest - marketing tools available!

Discover the power of the Blog Blaster!
Brandnew software revolutionizes the power of online advertising
-never seen before!- BRAND NEW FOR 2007!

How would you like 2 Million Sites linking to your ad?

Click here to visit my website

Hi, my name is Sebastian Foss. Are you like me? Frustrated by the lack of traffic coming to your Site ?
After all, how many times a day are you BOMBARDED with some lame "get-traffic" scheme on the Internet?

Well, I've got great news for you.
One day I had an idea. An amazing idea actually.

Weblog or blog population is exploding around the world, resembling the growth of e-mail users in the 1990s.

Post your ads where people read them!

- What if you could place your ad on all these sites ?
Right, that would mean you would have millions of sites linking to your ad - and my idea actually works.

I have developed a software that automatically places your ad on millions of blogs.

You will receive thousands of targeted hits to your website as Blog Blaster places your ad on blogs that match your ad's category.
This method has never been released to the public before. Very few, if anyone has implemented this.

Click here to visit my website

Features of Blog Blaster
-Blog Blaster automatically posts your ad to more than 2 Million Websites!
-Be among the first to use this brandnew method of online advertising and dominate the web with your ads!
-Blog Blaster will automatically create thousands of links to your website - which will rank your website in a top 10 position!
-Receive hundreds of targeted hits to your website every day from the links in the blogs!

-Post your ads where people read them!
-The software is not complicated - it's as easy as 1,2 - 3
-No matter if you are a professional advertiser or new to online advertising - -Blog Blaster is suitable for everyone.
-You can use Blog Blaster for as many ads as you like - no limitations!
-You do NOT have to pay monthly fees to use Blog Blaster - pay once and use it forever!
-Your ads stay visible for a long time - daily submissions are not required!

-I personally guarantee that if the software does not increase your website's traffic you will receive a full refund! There is absolutely NO RISK!
-Advertising using Blog Blaster is 100% SPAM FREE advertising! You will never be accused of spamming.
-24/7 Support for our customers! You will even receive my personal email address so I can assist you.

Be among the first to use this brandnew method of online advertising and dominate the web with your ads!

 

Click here to visit my website

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Comments

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

And why are you hiding this guy's company name? I think the Internet population as a whole needs to nip this in the bud before this takes off.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Linking to them gives them a higher ranking on Google searches.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not to mention providing clickable links that someone is bound to follow. AND leading them thus back to my LJ.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

This is also a valid point; however, there exist dereferers which you can use to obviate that risk - one I've used has been dereferer.org. Just construct a URL of the form http://dereferer.org/?http://www.google.com/, and the link will bounce through a neutral intermediary.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Useful, but more trouble than it's worth for this particular instance. ;p

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

I think, I'm going to be sick. Ganking this and posting it in my forums as a warning to others...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree, it is sickening. People who can think of nothing more productive to do than create such garbage deserve the very worst punishment imaginable. And I don't mean capital punishment, that's too quick.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I wonder how smart some of the spamware is. If it did a trial run and then checked to see if the payload was "usefully" delivered, it would explain a few odd comments I get from time to time. These are to journal entries that are months or years old and the text is either gibberish (key mashing) or some generic "Great website, blah blah" thing without any product mention or URL. As I screen non-friends replies, they don't show up for anyone but me - and I delete them.

So I wonder if those incidents are tests to see if posting something would leave it immediately visible, and if so then it spams that account further? So far I've only seen these screwball messages every once in a while. A decreasing frequency would not upset me in the least. Oh yeah, every great once in a while I also get an obvious spam comment, and that gets deleted too.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I have seen some actual commercial spam appear on LJ, but so far only in communities rather than personal journals. What I've seen in personal journals is more like either graffiti "tagging" where the poster is just trying to make a mark, like vandals writing on a wall, or otherwise deliberate trolling to try to get people to rise to some absurd bait so he can laugh at them.

The gibberish spam seems to be a form of tagging, sometimes used as harrassment of individuals who have identified an interest that the poster finds offensive, such as furry or gay or whatever.

I doubt that commercial spamming software bothers to check to see if it succeeded. Like spam e-mail, it would operate on the "more is better" principle and just dump trash everywhere in the hope that at least some of it will end up being seen before it gets deleted.

[damnbear.livejournal.com]

Oy, now all the Republican candidates will buy into mass blog intrusion with EMO campaign media posts.

What would Patrick Paulson do?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, LJ has a built in spam reporting system. You can bet any political spam that appears as comments in my journal is getting reported before I delete it.

LOL where do they come up with these names?

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Are you like me? Not hated by enough people? Hi, I'm Harmony Kwanza and I've got a new way to boost your hatemail by 200%, and increase your spam power & stamina- all with a simple cream!

Re: LOL where do they come up with these names?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Right. Just send Harmony your bank account numbers and passwords and she'll be happy to help you out.

Re: LOL where do they come up with these names?

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Please allow six to eight weeks for buyer's remorse :P

Re: LOL where do they come up with these names?

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Good old Harmony :) Its nice to see she's doing well.

Re: LOL where do they come up with these names?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Or at least doing evil... again.

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

If this is the source of the "Great website!" comment that I got a while back, he is going to have two problems. It would be child's play for a blog hosting service (which already captures the IP address of the source of any comment) to reject comments if an IP address had submitted one in, say, the previous 60 seconds, which would increase the time required to hit 2,000,000 blogs to a ridiculous level while having little impact on honest individual users. Also, I got that comment to a post that was months old. It may up his page's placement in Google a bit, but his click-through rate is going to be zero, because nobody will ever see it.

Still, I'm kind of surprised nobody thought of this before ... on the surface it is a fairly clever idea, even if it's one that (even if it worked) would suffer rapidly from diminishing returns.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Of course the guy selling this isn't concerned with how well it works. Once he's got the money, he's through. LJ seems to be fairly immune to such attacks, but I'm not sure about Blogspot, Google, or some of the other possible places.

What really offends me is the very idea that anyone would operate such a scam, or that anyone would consider buying into it. Yet the proliferation of obnoxious spam e-mails offering to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever proves that the number of gullible people out there does not diminish.

P.T. Barnum was right.