Spings, or rather pings from splogs and non-blogs inundate ping servers. We did an analysis on this last year by characterizing splogs at ping servers. The problem makes ping servers far less attractive as a “blogosphere update manager”. Recently while looking at weblogs.com pingstream, I noticed something very strange, a new form of spings are now in use by comment/guestbook spammers.

The model used by these spammers has so far been –

• Spam comments on blog postings/guestbooks
• Wait for the next seach crawl of compromised pages
• Bask in artificially inflated rankings

However, its now changing –

• Spam comments on blog postings/guestbooks
• Send proxy pings on compromised postings/guestbooks to ping servers
  
• Bask in artificially inflated rankings, faster

Here’s a sampling of what we have seen in the last couple of days (changes.xml) –

weblog name=”auto car finance max” url=”http://www.ctle.ngcsu.edu/prof_chuck/?p=129″
weblog name=”best refinance mortgage” url=”http://www.ctle.ngcsu.edu/prof_chuck/?p=120″
weblog name=”cheap motor car insurance” url=”http://www.ctle.ngcsu.edu/prof_chuck/?p=122″
…
weblog name=”interest mortgage rate refinance” url=”http://www.gajaweb.de/guestbook/gb/index.php”
weblog name=”debt management plan” url=”http://www.dartzwerge.de/guestbook/index.php” />

And, here’s the entire list of spings for ngcsu.edu domain over the last 5 days.

We will of course investigate this further.

Related posts: • Big spike in blog comment spam?;  • The Spammed Strike Back!;  • Welcome to the Splogosphere: 75% of new pings are spings (splogs);  

Posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 1:00 pm in categories [Uncategorized]. Comments feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site. edit