How To Split An Atom

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The wandering salesmen of Cialis and multi-level-marketing scams have added a new weapon to their arsenal — trackbacks. If you have ever run a blog, you know that it is only a matter of time before your content is scrapped and wrapped in Adsense. Most of us are almost OK with this by now, I know I am. What I am not OK with is this new form of spam that takes screen scraping and puts it on steroids.

As I pour through my spam list, I see the usual detritus of links and feigned praise hoping to trick me into letting them onto the site. Soon afterwards, though, things start getting weird. I head into my most recent post and start seeing things like this,

My Name Isn’t Anil

[…] Anil wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAs part of my job as a web strategist I’m monitoring trends, evaluating best practices, researching technologies and implementing creative use of evaluated technologies (ideally leveraging existing or up and coming trends). … […]

Odd, I didn’t think my name isn’t Anil. After checking my drivers license, I confirm this fact and continue scrolling. There is, in fact, a flood of other identical trackbacks from pseudonyms ranging from “Jeff” to “X-Men Legends Walkthrough”. It’s about this time that I notice something is terribly wrong. Wave after wave of fake sites are taking excerpts of my content, adding fake author information to it and then passing it off as their own. To add insult to injury, they are using my site as a promotional platform by adding their trackback. Most of these trackbacks seem to be arriving from the same set of .info domains, and are probably a part of the same push.

After talking to a few other bloggers, I discovered that this is not an isolated incident. Spammers have discovered that most spam filters treat trackbacks a lot more gently than they do comments. They are exploiting this fact to side-step around our filters. So, what can you do to stop them? Well, if you are using Wordpress one thing you can do is try Spam Karma. This plugin will give you fine grained control over what you let through your filters. You can add IP addresses and entire domains to a blacklist, which are then propagated through the network of sites that use Spam Karma — helping everyone.

Akismet also learns from the comments you set to spam, so be sure you aren’t letting any of this sites through thinking that they are legitimate links.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Unfortunately, this doesn’t prevent spammers from just generating a whole new set of splogs, but it will slow them down and that’s all spam warriors have ever hoped to do. The question, have you been affected by this latest vector in Spam warfare? If so, has it made it reconsider how you run comments on your site?

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