You will have seen all the splogs as they are called (spam blogs) hosted on Blogger, a lot of them scrape Darknet articles and repost them there with a hope of getting a few hits and some Adsense clicks.

That’s why we limit RSS feeds to only a few hundred characters, so they can’t syndicate our whole content. Anyway that’s beside the point, the point is now people are using Blogger sites for phishing aswell.

Surfing Google’s Blogger Web site is dangerous, warns Fortinet. Several of the blogs on the site have been taken over by miscreants and redirect to phishing Web sites or try to load malicious software onto PCs, the security firm said in an alert Wednesday.

In one example a Blogger blog redirects to what appears to be an online pharmacy, but is in fact a site hosted in China that’s part of a scam to trick people into giving up personal details and financial information, Fortinet said.

In another example, a blog site that appears to belong to a Honda CR450 enthusiast actually tries to install a Trojan horse, Fortinet said. The blog likely was hacked, Fortinet said.

Launching some malware from over there too, seems like people are getting more into online fraud as more and more less savvy users join the Internet masses and are easily conned out of their bank details or Paypal accounts or similar.

“These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service,” a Google representative said in an e-mailed statement. “We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted.”

Safe surfing tools such as Exploit Prevention Labs’ LinkScanner and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor could help protect against such malicious sites. Additionally, staying up-to-date on security patches, as well as turning off scripting in a Web browser and using common sense and caution help people to stay safe when traversing the Web.

Most of them are made for the purpose of conning people, I guess Google should be pretty strict with these and make sure they are closed down fast.

Source: Cnet

I find a lot of my own entries on there, surrounded by Adsense ads.

New age scrapers I guess.

Technorati returns a lot of results from splogs too, but at least they have made some efforts to clean that up and Google and being making sign-ups for blogspot much stricter so people are having to resort to their own domains, like the scrapers.

Microsoft today released new research on the epidemic of spam blogs — or “splogs” — as well as the “comment spam” that dodgy marketers splatter all over blogs in a bid to improve their sites’ search-engine rankings. Redmond’s research team found that splogs hosted on Google’s Blogspot.com appear to be widely spammed and fairly effective at jacking up the search results for the spammers’ Web sites.

Comment spam is also getting pretty bad, I can get a couple of hundred a day on some sites.

I’m glad they are making some kind of effort to sort it out.

Yi-Min Wang, manager of Microsoft’s cybersecurity and systems management research group, told me that the goal of Search Defender is to help the software giant automate the filtering of splogs and comment spam links in search results returned on MSN.com.

“We now have a method to identify spammers so that before they get indexed into search results, we can block them,” Wang said. “When this is fully automated, the spammers will need to spend a lot more effort trying to get into our search results.”

We ourselves as writers also have to take measures to curb the comment spam, I use Akismet and find it extremely effective!

But that’s just a start: Sitepoint has some excellent tips on fighting comment spam. Also, most of the major blogging sites now include pointers on how to use antispam features. Blogger.com lets users require commenters to follow a verification process — essentially a captcha — to help weed out automated processes. Wordpress has its own tips here, or users can outsource their blogspam patrol (well, sort of) with Akismet, a free (for personal use) tool that compares any link, trackback or comment left on your Wordpress blog to a service “which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.” SixApart, which runs TypePad and LiveJournal, also lists a number of tips for users fed up with blogspam.

At least everyone is aware of it now, we just need to get back to fighting it.

Source: Washington Post