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Introducing Splogs: Spammers Abusing Blogs
Web addicts and families around the world are not the only ones to enjoy web logs, better known as blogs. Their sheer popularity has made them prime targets for spammers, always on the lookout to abuse new tools with a view to flooding mailboxes with their unsolicited messages.
What is a splog?
Before getting into the splog threat, let’s get back to basics: blogs are living documents, which go from a single post by their author to full-fledged discussions between strangers. In an ideal internet, bloggers write a journal about what matters to them, and readers with similar interests respond. The popularity of blogs lies in their great simplicity: it’s fast and easy to create a blog, and it’s even faster to publish information on it, or to respond to a post.
But what happens if those very same qualities are exploited by spammers to create thousands of fake blogs promoting their own dubious wares? Blogs then become more noise with less contents, and everybody loses out but the spammers. How can this happen? The attacker, or splogger, uses automated tools to manipulate a blogger service into creating thousands of fake blogs. The sploggers load these phony blogs with links to specific Web sites for which they are paid to generate traffic, like home mortgage, poker or tobacco sites.
By fooling the search-engine spiders that keep a tally of web destinations and their popularity, sploggers manipulate search results in order to credit their blogs with more value than they are worth. This in turn boosts the revenue from ads placed on the fake blog sites. And if you have a blog on the same service, it’ll probably drop to the bottom of the web ranking, annihilated by an army of splogs. It’s time fight back…
What exactly is the threat?
Splogs and abused page rankings waste Internet users’ time by directing them to web pages that have nothing to do with the words they’re searching for. Sploggers make accessing information more difficult, saturate hosting platforms and discredit blogs.
What’s worse, these fake blogs, created by unscrupulous authors, can contain links contaminated by spyware, Trojans or even viruses. The risk of coming across an infected blog is still minimal, but there have already been reports of emails inviting readers to click on a link to an infected blog.
How can you fight back?
If you have your own blog, a splog may try to steal your contents in order to generate more traffic. To avoid this, subscribe to news feeds at search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and PubSub. Those syndication services are designed to track blogs, Most bloggers use these services to track what other blogs say about them, but the search engine will also detect splogs usurping your contents. Type in search terms that are similar to your name, your site’s name, or your site’s URL. You’ll recognize a splog by the unusual number of buzzwords in the main contents area. And splogs often redirect visitors to an entirely different site.
Be careful about comments: another trick of spammers is to trash a pre-existing blog by adding spam comments to legitimate articles. It’s not because you are on a friend’s blog that the comments (and the links within) are all nice and to the point. If your friend does not clean up regularly, many of these can lead to sites controlled by spammers, in order to boost their popularity or disseminate spyware.
Make sure you have installed a reliable firewall and anti-virus tool to protect your data from any hackers, viruses, worms and Trojan horses that you may encounter while following a link on a splog (which, of course, you’re too smart to do!)
Internet users should be just as vigilant as they are about emails and websites in general. Don’t click on suspicious links or objects, and make sure to update your anti-virus and other software.
Be a good blog citizen!
While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to an individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. What happens when all search terms become infested with these splogs? It will make it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for, and you will no longer know who to trust. So for the blog and Internet community’s sake, when you notice a splog—report it.
On some blogging sites, there is a flag or button where you can click to report a splog for objectionable contents. Blogger administrators will then investigate the site.
If there is no button, flag, or link, you may have to contact the blog host directly. You could report the splog to the new, grass-roots service Splog Reporter. Splog Reporter relies on a special splog-identification system that analyzes a blog’s URL for suspicious keywords and punctuation like hyphens—. For some reason, most splogs are hyphenated. Splog Reporter adds suspect sites to its database, alerting search engines to remove them from their indexes.
If the splog contains Google ads, the site can be reported to Google’s AdSense program, which may decide to revoke the account.
One of the best ways to fight splogs is to be vocal about them. Demand accountability and diligence from hosting providers, and demand additional barriers in the blog-creation process. In addition to speaking out, security software like Norton Internet Security from Symantec can help protect your identity and guard against destructive viruses, worms and Trojan horses.
Conclusion
Right now, splogs are more annoying than dangerous, but sploggers are getting more sophisticated and malicious. Whether you have your own blog site, you read blogs, or you just use the Internet, take the simple precautions outlined in this article to access the Internet freely, and secure your computer.
If you wish, we can give you a call to discuss your needs.