New spam tactic: Spam profiles on social networks
Monday, June 29, 2009
Spammers have been creating profiles on social networking sites to attract unsuspecting users through spam friend requests and messages, according to Google researcher Jason Morrison, writing on the Google webmaster blog.
Some fake profiles include popular pharmaceuticals as the profile name, but savvier spammers have begun to use real names and realistic data to fly under the radar and populate the network with bad links.
"To make sure their newly-minted gibberish profile shows up in searches they will also generate links on hacked sites, comment spam and yes, other spam profiles," Morrison said on the blog. "This results in a lot of bad content on your domain, unwanted incoming links from spam sites and annoyed users."
Morrison warned that spammers can exploit bulletin boards and content management systems such as vBulletin, phpBB, Moodle and Joomla that generate member pages for every user that creates an account.
Webmasters can cut down on spammers exploiting their websites through anti-spam features such as CAPTCHAs and user reporting of suspect profiles.
Facebook, under attack from spammers using hijacked accounts, filed a lawsuit in February against notorious "spam king" Sanford Wallace, claiming they violated CAN-SPAM and won a restraining order in March banning them from the site.
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