Tag: Spam

Finally!

A comment spammer left this comment on an earlier blog post

Finally, an issue that I am passionate about. I have looked for information of this caliber for the last several hours. Your site is greatly appreciated.

Glad I could procure something for him/her to finally be passionate about.

Most Convincing Spam Yet

In the past I’ve often remarked that spammers must be stupid because they generally commit some silly, obvious error when forging an email. That all changed today…

This morning I received an email, ostensibly from Amazon, advertising Erotic Monday specials. I’m a pretty laissez-faire kind of guy but this seemed a bit over the top for me. I mean, I read my personal email on my personal machine at work, but I do use the company network and they monitor traffic to some degree. The last thing I need is to have to justify my personal computer usage because I much prefer to work on a mac to the extent possible.

All of this to say receiving this email put me over the edge. I decided to unsubscribe from Amazon’s friendly reminders about sales and specials. Having made the decision, I clicked the “unsubscribe” link only to be surprised when I landed on some purported Canadian pharmacy’s international shipping page. Thinking this to be exceptionally odd, I went back over the email’s source code.

Lo and behold, it’s a damn near perfect forgery. It copies Amazon’s layout, uses images off Amazon’s servers, it links to products in Amazon’s catalog. The only difference being that several key bits of hyperlink functionality run out to this spammer’s site instead of Amazon. This is how I would do spam if I were inclined to spam. Thankfully it was sales-oriented spam and not infection vector spam because I didn’t give it a second thought before clicking the unsubscribe link.

/me makes a mental note to mouseover all links in HTML email before clicking.

Spring Jinxes

Not that I encourage spam, or even read a minuscule portion of it, but this struck me as oddly humorous. This one comes from “muriel” with the subject line something along the lines of “did you get my previous email…”

We’re always working to get you the best on the market

http://www.geocities.com/[some gibberish here]/

and senior media executives.[3] As a measure of the club’s exclusivity, it is reported the waiting
overseas. Californian guests are generally limited to attendance at the “Spring Jinxes”, in June,

It just leaves me wondering what exactly the “Spring Jinxes” are and why this is a constraint only for Californian guests. Maybe muriel will write back with more information…

The Agenda

You can smell it in the air. You can hear it rumbling in the distance. You can see the dust cloud on the horizon…

So the commentary in this post seems to have struck a chord, or maybe a nerve, with the St. Johnny’s crew—especially the righteous Anthony Whorebath. A man who would not normally deign to address little old me, but who has decided to make an exception. A man who is so busy traveling as to not have net access enough to drop comment spam on this wayward [and heretofore little noticed] blog but yet clears enough time and magically finds an internet connection during his travels long enough to engage in a limp effort at a punch up.

It would appear that Righteous Tony is playing the Swift Boat card. By his reckoning there is no way I received a comment on this blog linking to his site from the same IP subnet that serves his site because he was “out of town” and “away from internet access during the time in question.” Never mind that I made no mention of when the comment was actually sent… But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

His rant doesn’t stop there, though, because the Good Lord provides in mysterious ways. Never mind how spurious our crossed paths might be, little ol’ sinner me has presented Mr. Whorebath with an opening to attack his perceived enemies. In his world I am in league with Richard Carrier who was subject to a “blistering take down” at the hands of Big Tony over some internecine Battle Royale or other. In fact, Mr. Carrier is so demoralized by the extreme Logical Suplex thrown by Mr. Whorebath that he has now resorted to Gogglebombing.

Memo to Anthony Horvath:

Sometimes getting called out for comment spam is just getting out for comment spam. Spammers all make mistakes at some point. We accept your apology. Now lets just move on.

I would like to say, OTOH, that your quick thinking and opportunistic use of some random inbound linkage to further promote your swindle shows promise. You may just be able to keep a step ahead of your flock as you lead them to slaughter. Good luck, sir.

St. Spammy’s dot Com

So I posted a podcast today as I do on occasion, especially on Sundays when the dogs decide it is time to wake up long before I would like and/or Elz does. The few spare hours on a Sunday morning are nice for their self-directed solitude.

However, we digress…

So, like I said, I post this podcast and maybe even listen to the first half hour or so. It all works. All is good in the land of fezzes and pet hair. Elz and I go about our day. A late breakfast that would be called lunch if it didn’t consist of bacon!, eggs, hash browns, and toast. We feed a bit to the dogs because that’s what dogs live for. We doodle around on the computers a bit before getting ready for the big bowling bash. We then bowl (and, oh, someday I’ll have to write about that too) and leave and I drive to work…etc.

All this leading up to the point where I write the previous post identifying a d-i-y for making lava lamps. Before leaving the old WP management console I check in on the comments queue and, lo, there’s a comment!

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick. We just don’t get a lot of those around here. Heck, we don’t really even get readers around these parts. Still and all, there’s a comment demanding moderation. So I take a look…

It’s basically a word-for-word quote of my post with a “foo says:” hyperlinked to some evangelical Christian nutbar site. So, assuming that they’re not being swift boated by some vigilante 733t h4X0rz, these “Christians” feel justified in using comment spam to spread the word of Christ. Brilliant.

After all, if you look at this comment spammer’s website you’ll see links to right wing fact benders, Anthony Horvath pimps his book filler, and charitable fronts for lining evangelical leaders’ pockets. There’s a lot of “angry god, righteous jesus” editorializing and the whole bag of crap this brand of Corporate Christianity brings with it.

So, yeah, didn’t approve the comment but that didn’t feel quite good enough. Thought you’d all like to know what a shit Anthony Horvath is and what a crapular collection of charitable fronts one could use to line one’s pockets might look like. Enjoy the googlebomb you fuckstick.

Update: 20080303T162356
So I check the comments to this post and there’s some link farm building WordPress blog with a Christian bent doing essentially the same thing as St. Johnny’s. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Chuckles? Is spam the new path to salvation? Is anyone else running into this behavior?

Oh, and please do not confuse this with Ms. Massey in the comment section. Which, by the way, thank you and welcome aboard.

Intimidating Spam

Subject: FUCK YOU
From: “HEY YOU PIDAR!!” <order@carderproduct.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:55:23 -0400
To: me@mydomain.com

HI SHITTER

IF YOU WANNA BUY SOMETHING —>

GO TO http://www.carderproduct.com

FUCK YOU, SHIT!!!!

EVEN DONT THINK TO ABUSE FOR SMPAM!!!

If that doesn’t get me buying something, nothing will…