AngryPets Blog

Observations on Referrer Spam

So, I've been secretly paying attention to some patterns I've seen among Referrer/Comment Spammers. Here are some things I've noticed:

1. While some sites list referrers, most do not. This doesn't stop referrer spammers from spamming the HELL out of sites that do not. AngryPets.com, for example, does not list referrers. But in the space of 15 days, I was hit 1300+ times with bogus referrers. MAYBE they think that I'll see those referrers in my internal analytics, and will click on the link? -- I kind of doubth that's their hope. What I really think: They simply don't care. From what I've seen, referrer spammers ONLY pay attention to the HTTP Response Code returned in the header (they don't wait around for the body/content/etc). If they get a 200 (OK), they keep spamming. Period. However, if they see that access was denied, they stop. Period. (So it would appear that it's a bit like email spam: the cost to them is so minimal to spam, they might as well hit everything they can. (And if you think about it, opening an SMTP connection is probably way more expensive than thumpin an HTTP site a few times with a special 'browser' that only cares about the response code.))
2. Comment spammers APPEAR to monitor how long their comment spam stays 'active.' My SQL Server blog is hosted by sqladvice.com, and uses .Text (it will be transitioning to Community Server shortly). CAPTCHAs managed to stop most/all comment spam to the blogs on aspadvice.com but haven't been deployed to sqladvice.com yet. Consequently I get a slow trickle of comment spam to my RepeatableRead blog. Here's what I've noticed: I sit in front of my computer way too much. As such, when new comment spam arrives, I quickly squelch it. Doing that has had some interesting effects (or so I think, it could be coincidental). First of all, I had losers posting GIGANTIC comments with scads of links. After continously removing them immediately, the posts started getting MUCH shorter (2 or 3 links instead of 20+). But I kept squelching them. Eventually the comment spam almost died out (My blog is unique, I think, in that it gets some traffic but not LOTS, so it's not a huge target). Then I went on vacation. And decided to leave my machine off. Comment spammers RAPED my blog. Not only is the spam back at all time high levels, but the comments are back up to being gigantic. It sure SEEMS that when I went on vacation, they quickly clued in to the fact that their comments were 'living' longer, and seemed to see that as an invitation to spam me even more (and invite their buddies--on the second day of ignoring my comment spam I got spam for 'good deals' I hadn't seen before).
   So, now I'm back in the process of trying to 'inform' these spammers that I don't appreciate poker, drugs, mortgages and other crap that much. If that has an effect, then that makes for some interesting info about the way these losers operate...

Existing Comments:

# re: Observations on Referrer Spam - Posted: 6/23/2005 11:53 AM - By: Scott Mitchell
   Have you considered adding techniques to automate the killing of spam? Then you don't have to sweat it when you go on vacation. I talk about a TRIGGER-based approach in my blog here:
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/3083.aspx

# ReverseDOS: Past, Present, Future - Posted: 6/24/2005 10:29 PM - By: AngryPets.com :: Blog
   

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