Re: Spammers
PostPosted:Fri May 13, 2011 6:13 am
Actually, the bulk of the 475 fell into 3 categories: Zombies, Sleepers and Orphans.
The Zombies are accounts registered and activated, then left to sit dormant since most sites target the recent registered bots that start spamming. Eventually, they come back and start spamming the boards. Quite often, they don't load the profile full with all the signature links UNTIL they are ready to strike.
If a Zombie if left dormant too long, or if the account gets flagged by other boards and the email hosting provider gets enough complaints, the account is abandoned once the email address is deleted from their host. Now the account is an Orphan and depending on a forum's settings, Spiders and Scrapers can still be grabbing the spam backlinks and that is what the spammers are after... It's BlackHat SEO backlinking for the purpose of gaming Search Engine relevance for the links they post. More backlinks means better search placement. The Zombies are usually activated in waves, to many non-relevant backlinks in a short period of time will adversely affect search placement. If they wait to long, the the Zombies are abandoned and orphaned.
The Sleepers are the most troubling, these are accounts that pass all the check used to verify that an account is a valid one registered by a real person that has a legitimate reason to be posting here. These accounts DON'T pass the sniff test though, they look bogus for all intents. Most likely, they are clean account used for recon, possibly by scammers and not spammer. Registered users can easily page scrape the member list to harvest email addresses and web links.
The bulk of the accounts I cleaned out were older Orphans, I cringe to think of how many accounts the admins were deleting prior to this week. It's amazing that they had any time to ever post on the forums at all! The methods I've used to test accounts has been shared with the admins, I won't share it publicly, since THE ENEMY IS LISTENING. But I will say that it's one that is geared towards 0% false positive results.
The Zombies are accounts registered and activated, then left to sit dormant since most sites target the recent registered bots that start spamming. Eventually, they come back and start spamming the boards. Quite often, they don't load the profile full with all the signature links UNTIL they are ready to strike.
If a Zombie if left dormant too long, or if the account gets flagged by other boards and the email hosting provider gets enough complaints, the account is abandoned once the email address is deleted from their host. Now the account is an Orphan and depending on a forum's settings, Spiders and Scrapers can still be grabbing the spam backlinks and that is what the spammers are after... It's BlackHat SEO backlinking for the purpose of gaming Search Engine relevance for the links they post. More backlinks means better search placement. The Zombies are usually activated in waves, to many non-relevant backlinks in a short period of time will adversely affect search placement. If they wait to long, the the Zombies are abandoned and orphaned.
The Sleepers are the most troubling, these are accounts that pass all the check used to verify that an account is a valid one registered by a real person that has a legitimate reason to be posting here. These accounts DON'T pass the sniff test though, they look bogus for all intents. Most likely, they are clean account used for recon, possibly by scammers and not spammer. Registered users can easily page scrape the member list to harvest email addresses and web links.
The bulk of the accounts I cleaned out were older Orphans, I cringe to think of how many accounts the admins were deleting prior to this week. It's amazing that they had any time to ever post on the forums at all! The methods I've used to test accounts has been shared with the admins, I won't share it publicly, since THE ENEMY IS LISTENING. But I will say that it's one that is geared towards 0% false positive results.
