Spammed
Posted on Jun 19, 2009 - 10:23am by Wayne Weisser in News
And not in the good way. After upgrading to the latest version of WordPress one of the older plugins we don’t use anymore broke the admin portion of the site and it took awhile to get the problem resolved. In the meantime the plugin that stops the majority of the spam was turned off as well and some of the authors emails were bombarded with spam.
Everything should be back to normal now. The admin area is restored, the anti-spam plugin is working and I went through and deleted all of the spam comments.
I’ll probably post more on spam and spammers in general because I don’t see what the return is for doing that. There are so many tools and programs that combat spam the odds are rare that anyone will even see your link and probably even rarer that the few people that do see it, will be interested in whatever crap they’re pushing to even click on the link, let alone go there and buy something. I just don’t get it.
Sorry, Sleeping, Can’t Talk Now…
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I’ve never understood the spam thing either. These folks must send out a large enough number of bulk emails that even a small portion of the victims buying the junk makes them a profit.
Interesting thing about all of these spam comments is that NONE of them appear to originate in the US-all Amsterdam or Latin America. Although my personal ISP is pretty good on catching spam (too good-it sends all kinds of valid email to the trash and I have to go check twice a day to retrieve them from the dumpster), all the spam fighters in the world dont seem to be able to keep the nasty little annoyances from collecting everywhere I go via click, apparently. I search something on assistive equipment to help my mom and I get Hovercraft ads for months! How do you put a stop to that? Anonymizer?
comment spam works a little differently but of course is done for the same reasons.
I’ve suggested a couple of tool to the admins that will help with the automated programs used for a lot of this stuff.
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They do it because a good percentage of people don’t do Windows updates or they let their anti-virus/spam filters go stale and can easily be infected.
Wayne Linda and Chris hit it on the head … its a numbers game with 2 goals … send Billions hoping for thousands and catch a few more machines with which to to spam and infect more to keep the numbers growing …
If I send out 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) peices of spam and only have a success rate of .001 that is still one million peices of spam that have worked on one of my two goals.
it sux … but they must be making money at it or it’d just die on its own. We know the BotNets are succesful …