Thursday, August 22, 2013

Comment spammers with embedded "fishing" links raise yet another reason to have to moderate comments, besides the illmannered hateful (always anonymous) drivel mongers.

I get a Google email for every comment submitted, to either post it, discard it as stupid, or discard it as possibly malicious.

The ones that are possibly malicious have embedded links, which may be to malware laden sites.

A previous post, not too recent, shows up with "Chase" saying, "This is terrific."

First, it is not specific to a post, which is a generic thing that can be automated to hit random semi-recent posts - blog, after blog, after blog - tens of thousands in a second.

Second, it is pandering to ego, which, in line with most comments I get, raises suspicion.

Third this individual, in whatever nation, with whatever motives, for his "identity" embeds this specific hot link to "Chase" - where I deliberately have not made a hot link - don't try it - I show it for illustrative purposes only -

http://bestrowingmachinereviews.us/2013/08/15/never-do-this/

Another variation of comment spamming I have seen looks something like this: "I am happy you wrote that, and said it as you did. You should read my post at [inserted link]."

Comment spamming that way with the baited (possibly malicious) link within the comment itself is easier to see immediately, which is why comment spammers seem to recently have shifted to loading the link into the commenter's identity field on a comment.

People who do that are a nuisance at best. They are fishing for blog readers to innocently step into a situation that might prove harmful to a reader's best interests.

Less malicious but still a nuisance, there are people wanting to get site hits via ginning up false popularity, perhaps where the site has been monetized to get some miniscule fraction of a penny in advertiser paid royalty per hit accumulated to a greater bounty by link spamming.

Whatever the motive, link spamming is bad behavior.