Wednesday, January 25, 2006

New Anti "Badware" Website

The Berkman Center has launched a new website worth paying attention to: stopbadware.org. We had not heard the phrase "badware" until today, but it sounds like a good way to sum up all the nastiness that is going on with our PC's.
We first took note of Harvard's Berkman Center a few years ago, when Ben Edelman was one of the few souls out there speaking out against the evils of spyware. Since our websites were victims of spyware, we appreciated what Berkman was doing. It looks like they are taking it to the next level. This website promises to be a valuable resource.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Now It's "Form Mail Spam." Anyone Interested in a Blacklist?

Within the last month, we started to receive a new class of spam that we hadn't specifically seen before. Bots are now filling out the "form mail" forms of our sister sites in the MetroGuide Network, presumably with the expectation that what they are doing will be posted to the target website automatically.
As a matter of history, we set up our form mail systems to deal with the problem of bots harvesting e-mail addresses posted on our sites. We think pretty much everybody has form mails for the same reason. Because the form mail sends an e-mail directly to the server, the recipient's e-mail is not exposed to the web. So, spammers apparently decided to write bots that will post stuff on site's forms. This garbage recently appeared on one of our restaurant forms:

Restaurant Name: hydrocodone
Address : hydrocodone
City: hydrocodone
State: usa
E-Mail: rarar@mail.com
Want to write a review?: Yes
Your favorite dish was: The best site ever!Thank's.
<a href="http://a-hydrocodone.ifrance.com/" <strong>hydrocodone</strong></a>
etc. etc.

The above came from IP address 81.25.43.159. Our current plans for revising the Stop Piracy Now mission is to build a real time blacklist of IP's and sites that are engaging in this tactic. This will presumably turn out to be the same people who are engaging in massive comment spam on everyone's blogs. Would anyone be interested in using such a blacklist?