Sploiter Splog
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs or Blam!, are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are a type of scraper site, where content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites. These blogs contain an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites. wikipedia
Let's pick the keywords from the text presented above. Spam, blogs, promoting, PageRank, text stolen and high number of links. Right, keep that for a moment!
Creating a spam blog is easy. Find as many RSS feeds as possible. Put them into some kind of RSS consumer written in whatever language you prefer. Upload the consumed posts into blogs that you control. Enjoy your empire. Soon, you will receive hits from everywhere, especially from Technorati. Then other splogers will duplicate your feeds. You may also generate some profit by putting some ads from Google... But what if you are malicious? Instead of ads you can control a small army of soldiers ready to serve upon your command. You think it is impossible? What if I tell you that splogs can go far beyond what most vicious worms have achieved? Rapid propagation!!! I think so!
Using the techniques such as persistent channels, backdoors in QuickTime, backdoors in Flash, backdoors in PDF, backdoors in RealMedia and backdoors in RSS feeds in conjunction with splogs one can achieve quite a lot. Moreover, I know that the process can be automated. Every flash file the sploger downloads can be altered; every sound, backdoored; every image, changed. It is not a war between the humans and the machines. It is a war between us and ourselves only.
Let's get back to the keywords from the beginning of this post:
- Spam - a lot of content
- blogs - web2.0, everybody loves them
- promoting - a lot of users
- PageRank - better PageRank, even more users
- text stolen - phish better
- high number of links - persistance
So, where does this leave us? Well, to be honest with you, we are in a big $**
. Forget about your firewall and fancy antivirus and welcome the Wild Wild West 2.0
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