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October 16, 2005

Web Site News - The Next Wave of Trackback Spam

by Ferdinand T Cat

We've just received the most insidious trackback spam so far.

As I have mentioned before, Movable Type 3.2 assigns a score to any incoming trackback, and if the score is too low, the trackback is placed in a special junk folder where the blog owner can determine whether it should be deleted or published. If a particular user has already had a trackback published, they get an automatic +1 to their score. Two weeks ago, we were hit by a massive wave of spam trackbacks designed to establish phony identities the spammers could use to get this +1 score. These trackbacks were easy to detect and defeat. The new trackbacks we are receiving today are more clever: there is only one link (which is the minimum for a trackback) and the text used is related to conservative economic philosophy. Either this was an incredible coincidence, or they knew what kind of blog they were targeting.

Tragically for them, the blog name they used was "foo", the notorious primary source for porn trackbacks, so this wave of attacks is as easily defeated as the last one. I tell you, the thing that distresses me the most is this combination of skill and ineptitude. I know exactly how to defeat the system, and I live in mortal terror that some cat is going to spill the beans to a pet who works with trackback spammers.

In the meantime, be sure to add "foo" to your junk words list with a sufficiently high score to keep it from being published, ever.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat,

Trackposted to Cao's Foo Blog, Jo's Cafe and Foo, Basil's Foo Blog, The Political Teen and Foo, Stop the ACLU Foo, The California Conservative with Foo, Point Five Foo plus Foo, and Euphorically Foo Reality.

# At Sun 8:32 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Web Site News

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Fooey


Posted by: Don Surber at October 17, 2005 3:30 AM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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