Spam and Broken Windows, and wecanstopspam.org
Spam:
Spam Chongqing: Spamming Experiment:
Kasia at unix-girl.com decided to run a spamming experiment on her blog.
She posted a couple spams to her own blog and waited to see what would
happen. In less than 24 hours she received 356 more spams.
The chongqing guys confirm this, and I’ve noticed this as well (although
just in passing, I’ve never tried testing it).
Interestingly, I’m pretty sure the same thing can happen with mailing
lists, if the mailing list archives are allowed to contain the mailing
list’s posting address, and the list allows open posting. It works
like this:
- spammer A posts a spam to the list
- spam is archived
- google finds archived spam
- list-builders B, C, D google for search terms, find archive page for that mail message
- B, C, D scrape the addresses from that page and pick up the list posting address
- they then either sell on to spammers E, F, and G, who spam that address, or they spam the address themselves
- and redo loop from the start.
One key factor is the search terms B, C, and D use. My theory is that
they are intending to generate ‘targeted’ lists, and in spamming, most
targeted lists are simply lists of addresses scraped from pages that
show up in a google search for a specific keyword — ‘meds’, ‘viagra’,
‘degree’, etc.
Joe at chonqing surmises that it may be through the
Theory — that spam appearing in a weblog’s comments, or in a wiki
page, indicates that the administrator is asleep at the wheel and more
spam can be posted with impunity. in my opinion, that’s probably
more likely for google-spam and wiki-spam than for email spam, but
undoubtedly is a factor.
PS:
wecanstopspam.org has been allowed to lapse and has been stolen by
a spammer. Oh dear.
