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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Archives Apr 2005
Referrer and Comment Spam: A Primer
Introduction
There is a growing nuisance for users and administrators of sites that run web servers, and, particularly, blogs like this one: Comment, trackback and referer spam. I figured I’d take this lazy Saturday afternoon as an opportunity to try to lay out the various issues and attempts to combat this increasingly costly problem.
Dell India Expands
Looks like Dell is not worried about past problems in India, and is expanding its Indian workforce
Dell’s India staff will swell to more than 10,000 workers by year end, as the company fills out call center and software development roles.
To hit the 10,000 mark, Delli will need to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 workers over the next 8 months, CEO Kevin Rollins told reporters in Bangalore, according to numerous media reports. Despite push-back from customers and some employees, Dell has been relentless about offshoring customer support work. It currently employees far more staffers outside of the US than at home.
File-Sharing at All Time High
The RIAA and MPAA have been very vocal about the effect their legal actions have had on the decreasing popularity of file-sharing. However, Slyck.com did a study that tells a very different story, with P2P traffic nearly doubling since 2003.
run-parts
Debian has some handy directories for dropping scripts into regular cron rotation, /etc/cron.hourly/, /etc/cron.daily/, /etc/cron.weekly/ and /etc/cron.monthly/.
I spent a long time wondering (but never really looking) into why certain update scripts I had in there weren’t running. Turns out these scripts are called via “run-parts”, and, well, turns out it’s my stupid fault for not reading the manpage, which makes it pretty clear:
RUN-PARTS(8):
run-parts runs a number of scripts or programs found in a
single directory directory. Filenames should consist
entirely of upper and lower case letters, digits, under
scores, and hyphens. Subdirectories of directory and
files with other names will be silently ignored.
jabber Mac OS X FAQ
With the release of Mac OS X Tiger looming, Julian has wisely posted a handy FAQ for the Mac OS X Tiger user, that gives an intro to what Jabber/XMPP is and how to use it.
US Falls Behind in Broadband
Bad news: Looks like the US has fallen even farther behind in broadband deployment:
The United States has fallen yet further behind in broadband penetration, falling to 16th place in the world from 13th last year and 11th the year before, according to new numbers from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Of course, once upon a time – long before the ITU started keeping statistics on broadband – the United States was Number One.
Money Prime - Nashville Spammer
In a previous article about local spammers, I mentioned that we typically figure out how we ended up on a list and then unsubscribe.
This company is a little different - a more unscrupulous bunch. We have no affiliation or contact with them, and their ‘informative’ website provides no contact information.
In a feigned attempt to comply with Anti-Spam laws, they included their address in the spam message they sent to me & gave me the luxury of unsubscribing.
Localized Spammers
As the developer of Swirbo, CentreSource is highly sensitive to receiving spam messages - even when they come from our own backyard. When we do receive the such messages, we do a bit of investigating and try to understand how any of our staff ended up on the ‘newsletter’.
Most of the time, we can determine that the spammer took the liberty to accept a business card from a staff member - and then added us to a mailing list. The steps would be:
Web attacks soar
Looks like web defacement attacks are way up:
Web server attacks and website defacements rose 36 per cent last year, according to an independent report. zone-h, the Estonian security firm best known for its defacement archive, recorded 392,545 web attacks globally in 2004, up from 251,000 in 2003.
Mass defacements (322,188) were by far the largest category in 2004. More targeted cyber graffiti attacks numbered 70,357. zone-h also recorded 186 attacks on US governmental servers out of 3,918 attacks on government domains worldwide. Separately the security consultancy recorded 49 assaults on US military servers.
CNN comment spam?
Hm. Is CNN maliciously targeting blogs critical of CNN with comment spam? It sure looks like it. We’ll be discussing the growing problem of comment and referrer spam in more detail in coming posts.
