"Grabbing content through your blog’s feed and inserting or replacing synonyms in the content,
typically keywords the splogger needs to get the page ranking and
search terms to attract attention, has been around for a long time.
However, this form of conversion is dramatically different. The words don’t translate into recognizable search terms."

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"I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to a fairly recent philosophical issue that the Blogosphere has yet to adequately address. Namely, what is the root purpose of allowing author links from commenters - especially given the rising tide of Comment Spam?"

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However, little or nothing is available to help prevent registration spam.

Registration spam differs from comment spam as it comes through the WordPress login form, not blog comments. WordPress blogs which require registration to comment, contribute, or participate have little or no protection from spammers hammering away at their registration forms."

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A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

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"The other day I was hit hard on one posting with a spamrun. Not uncommon unfortunately, lost of Viagra pushers and real Rolex shifters post comments at many blog sites. While looking in to it, I saw that moments for the spamrun a real human was visiting that same node with a weird referrer URL. (S)he was Googling for "powered by drupal" "post new comment".

On the result of that query you will find a posting of mine around position 6. So thats how they find sites for dumping their nonsense comments, just FGI! Not that smart, I would use the same way of finding a Drupal site where I could post a comment, google for it."

The November 20, 2006 article "Spam surge linked to hackers" from eWeeks is a must read. Unfortunately, I can't find the actual online version of the article in print. I did however find a variant of the article posted as Pump and dump spam surge linked to Russian Bot Herders.

The article discusses the increasing complexity hackers are using botnets running on tens of thousands of hijacked Windows computers to spread spam. The article focuses on the research by SecureWorks regarding the malware trojan called Troj/SpamThru. Some scary unique features have been identified with this trojan including:

• Peer to Peer Communication (hackers can have control without a server)
• Anti-Virus Scanning (Uses anti-virus software to scan against rivals)
• Template-based spam
• Almost half of the PCs infected are PCs with Windows XP SP2 installed (outside of Vista, Microsoft's most secure Windows system to date).

Do I bring this up because I don't like Microsoft products? Not at all and in fact as I write this post I'm using a Windows XP system. My point is that if you plan on using Windows XP do all of us a favor and be sure you've installed on your PC the latest software updates and security patches available.

"There have been some big spikes in spam lately, and yesterday was the first day we processed more than 3 million comments. The spam has been coming in hard and fast, according to Six Apart’s status blog it was even the cause of Typepad downtime this morning."

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'We've known about [the threat from] botnets for a few years, but we're only now figuring out how they really work, and I'm afraid we might be two to three years behind in terms of response mechanisms,' said Marcus Sachs, a deputy director in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International, in Arlington, Va."

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