Trackback Spam Resources

16 Jun 2005: WP Hashcash

Not a trackback spam solution, of course, but WP Hashcash is a cute defense against comment spam by requiring a proof of work from the client.

Of course, as soon as comment spammers bake a JavaScript engine into their spambots, it’s all over, so Hashcash isn’t really breaking out of the “arms race” model of spam prevention. (But it does represent an impressively large leap in that race, so it’s likely to be quite effective for a while.)

Filed under Links, Prevention. 1 Comment »

16 Jun 2005: Tragedy

Funny: Trackback: A Tragedy In 3 Acts. Jason Lefkowitz offers a tongue-in-cheek play set at SixApart, as well as some slightly more sober analysis of how we got where we are today:

When your technology is open to abuse, silence is deadly. You might think that 6A, as the authors of the spec, would have made notice of the deep problems with TrackBack and been on top of finding solutions. Such is not the case: the official TrackBack blog hasn’t been updated in nearly a year, and their Professional Network lumps TrackBack spam in with comment spam and advises use of tools like MT-Blacklist for both. The result is a perception that no fix is coming, which leads people to abandon ship rather than wait for a fix they think will never come.

Filed under Attacks, Links. Comments Off

16 Jun 2005: Interview with a Link Spammer

From earlier this year, an interview with a link spammer in The Register. (TB is mentioned as a fallback for when comment-based link spamming becomes too difficult.)

Filed under Links. Comments Off

25 May 2005: Bought and sold.

Judging by some of the recent articles on SpamHuntress (another site dedicated to analysis and eradication of spam, including trackback spam), there are indeed lists of vulnerable weblogs floating around the Internetâ€”just like the lists of live addresses that email spammers buy and sell. Update: More SpamHuntress links, including her catalog of TB spam solutions and the new Spamhuntress Wiki, which includes some very interesting spammer profiles.

Filed under Attacks, Links. Comments Off

25 May 2005: Spammer attacks on WordPress.

Found elsewhere: Analysis of one particular attack on WordPress blogs.

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24 May 2005: How to get spammed, part 1.

Unclear to me at this point is exactly the mechanism by which trackback spammers find their marks. There’s some evidence that there exist Web spiders which look for Movable Type trackback URLs at conventional locations (in particular, the amount of spam can be reduced by obfuscating this URL; see the previous post on best practices).

Presumably there are also more sophisticated spiders which examine pages for the magic bit of RDF XML which identifies the correct Trackback location; obviously obfuscation doesn’t help here. But how do the spiders find weblogs? It’s likely that they follow links from other weblogs that they know about. This would perhaps help account for the power-law distribution in spam: the more popular your site, the more inbound links, the more visible your site to attackers.

Here’s an interesting corollary, gleaned from the WordPress 1.5 announcement:

WordPress 1.5 aims to bring the joy back to comments. [...] if you forget about your blog for a little while you wonâ€™t come back to find your domain a nest of spam (which begets more spam) [...]

The quote is part of a section touting the new whitelisting features in version 1.5, meant to keep the comments flowing from known-good writers. But why would spam beget more spam?

What Matt seems to be saying is that, much like email spammers who use various techniques (Web bugs in spam emails, for example) to determine that an email address is “live”, weblog comment and Trackback spammers may rely on successfully posted spam links to identify vulnerable sites. If a spammer sees your website in his referrer logs (even if none of your readers click on the spam links, Google sure will), he knows your site is ripe for further exploitation.

It would be interesting to observe the increase in comment spam associated with a few deliberate clicks to spam websites (using your weblog URL as the referrer). Is it possible to go from zero to spam in this way?

Let’s find out!

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24 May 2005: We hardly knew ye

Filed under Uncategorized. Comments Off

24 May 2005: Conventional wisdom.

Rounding up some reasonably authoritative links on current best practices in Trackback spam prevention:

Learning Movable Type: Trackback spam (Feb. 2, 2005). Techniques mentioned:
- content-based filtering (the obvious approach, inspired by email anti-spam techniques)
- obfuscation (juggling the the TB URL as well as nearby text; more examples here)
- blacklisting (ignoring known spam IPs)
- expiration (turning off TBs for old posts)
Plenty of additional links at the end of the article.
Matt Mullenweg: Trackback spam (Jan. 5, 2005). The original post isn’t much, but the discussion (in the form of comments, and, yes, trackbacks) offers a pretty good look at current best practices (geared toward WordPress users). Add to the above list of techniques:
- moderation (simply involve a human for every comment or TB received)
- whitelisting (remembering “known good” URLs, as pointed out by Matt in the comments; see the 1.5 announcement for more info)
WordPress wiki: Trackback Spam Tools/Plugins.

Filed under Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

Trackback Spam Resources

16 Jun 2005: WP Hashcash

16 Jun 2005: Tragedy

16 Jun 2005: Interview with a Link Spammer

25 May 2005: Bought and sold.

25 May 2005: Spammer attacks on WordPress.

24 May 2005: How to get spammed, part 1.

24 May 2005: We hardly knew ye

24 May 2005: Conventional wisdom.

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