Monday, June 07, 2004
Increadible technique by spammers...
In a /. discussion of people abusing google's rating system (by trying to get their url in as many places as possible), an amazing technique was brought up.
A lot of times spammers will have to join a message board or other kind of site in order to further their nefarious schemes (even simply joining a site might boost their cause if there is a page listing all user profiles and google pics it up).
Now, the thing is that some sites now have special methods where they create an image with some word on it, which a person has to type into an input box. Usually it is weird fonts and diagonally printed with all kinds of noise, making automated recognition by computer very difficult. The thing is, they find away around this, by getting people to do the work for them!
They set up a free porno site, which a person has to register for. When a new user goes to register for porn, that site goes to the "good" site and tries to join. It gets the image that needs to be decoded. It puts THAT image up on the porno page, where the person has to decode it. Then they take the result and use it to auto-join the other site!
Obviously, I don't approve of this, (more spam = ick!)... but I have to admit that that was an amazingly ingenious solution to the problem, getting unsuspecting people to do the work for them. I guess we have to be more vigilant than ever...
A lot of times spammers will have to join a message board or other kind of site in order to further their nefarious schemes (even simply joining a site might boost their cause if there is a page listing all user profiles and google pics it up).
Now, the thing is that some sites now have special methods where they create an image with some word on it, which a person has to type into an input box. Usually it is weird fonts and diagonally printed with all kinds of noise, making automated recognition by computer very difficult. The thing is, they find away around this, by getting people to do the work for them!
They set up a free porno site, which a person has to register for. When a new user goes to register for porn, that site goes to the "good" site and tries to join. It gets the image that needs to be decoded. It puts THAT image up on the porno page, where the person has to decode it. Then they take the result and use it to auto-join the other site!
Obviously, I don't approve of this, (more spam = ick!)... but I have to admit that that was an amazingly ingenious solution to the problem, getting unsuspecting people to do the work for them. I guess we have to be more vigilant than ever...
