A Message for Spam Commenters – WTF!

For many Bloggers, particularly technology Bloggers, comments are an important part of the mix. Amongst other things, comments can spark discussion (always a good thing), allow a reader to present his/her point of view, share tech wisdom, or spread the word on a unique piece of software.

But, Blog comments are not without their share of issues; with comment Spam, in my view, being the leading problem. Spam is virtually everywhere on the Internet. In your inbox, on Twitter and Facebook and other social networks, and so it’s not surprising that you’ll find Spam Blog comments.

Let me throw some numbers at you. In the roughly two years I have been writing this Blog, there have been 67,000+ comments of which 59,000 +  have been Spam. In other words only 8,000 (approximately), have been legitimate comments.

WordPress, on which this Blog is hosted, has a Spam plug-in filter, Akismet, which does a reasonable job of catching comment spam. Akismet automatically analyzes comments and flags for review, those it considers Spam. This is not as effective as it once was, since it’s now much harder to distinguish Spam comments from legitimate comments.

Except of course, for comments that look like these two examples from this morning:

Itboibltlx – fAHU7K kfyvjnunmugw, [url=http://avfqgyvilzvj.com/]avfqgyvilzvj[/url], [link=http://jlroercbkvod.com/]jlroercbkvod[/link], http://sjxsnveldoke.com/

Rzjulixnne – JvgMqE sakykccvvzrv, [url=http://dpbvrodxgikt.com/]dpbvrodxgikt[/url], [link=http://tiewycygcttc.com/]tiewycygcttc[/link], http://etukxnfppged.com/

When you see this type of comment, you have to wonder about these morons.

Since it takes time and effort to manually cull comments so that they are  relevant and Spam free, there are Bloggers who are fairly complacent and who rely only on a Spam filter to do this job. In doing so, they miss the reality: Spam filters can often miss comment spam, some of which is highly dangerous.

While comment Spam is a pain for the Blogger, a reader who follows a link in a malicious Blog comment, which leads to a malware site, is in for a very painful experience.

Here’s a case in point – just this past week (and not for the first time), a site which is renown as a site that specializes in malicious content, left a comment which was not filtered by Akismet. This comment included a link, to a free application, which supposedly was superior to the free application I recommended in the article.

The comment itself looks harmless – but you pay me to be careful – right?

If I’d allowed this comment to be posted (and I’ve seen this comment published many times, on many other sites), a reader who followed the link would have become infected simply by visiting the site.

Don’t think that this is an unusual set of circumstances – it’s not. On an average day, 10 or more comments (thankfully picked up by Akismet), contain malicious or dangerous links.

Some advice:

Be cautious when following links contained in comments on any web site – not just Blogs.

Be particularly cautious of comments, on any web site, where the writer is describing a problem with recommended software and offers a link to alternative software.  This is a favorite technique employed by cyber-criminals. All software reviewed on this site, for example, has been thoroughly tested for usability. If a reader has a problem with recommended software, it’s generally a machine specific problem.

Be cautious when following any link contained in any web site, since the latest reports indicate there are 5.8 million individual web pages infected across 640,000 compromised websites. Cyber-criminals are finding it easier than ever to inject malicious content into legitimate sites.

Since the majority of infected sites are infected with Java based scripts, consider using Firefox with the NoScript add-on active. NoScript offers superior protection.

Install an Internet Browser add-on that provides protection against questionable or unsafe websites. My personal favorite is Web of Trust, an Internet Explorer/FireFox add-on, that offers substantial protection against questionable, or unsafe websites.

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