Chowrangi

Comments are integral part of Blogging phenomenon. Comments allow readers of a blog to interact with the blogger and make blogging a two-way communication activity. However, most of the time comments are abused by spammers to promote and propagate messages of hate, violence, sex and racism.

Comment spam has turned into a thriving business with outfits originating from Russia, Asia and Eastern Europe, flooding blogs with messages ranging from Viagra Sale to Hot Videos and from Link Exchange requests to Site promotion by dropping URLs in comments. New breed of comment spammers cunningly go through blog posts and try to make a comment look like a relevant, genuine comment rather than piece of spam.

In last few weeks we have seen a sudden surge in comment spam on our blogs. Inspite of comment spam filters in place, hundreds of spam comments dodged the filters and made it to active moderation list on daily basis. Then, we received the following comment on couple of our blogs:

Name: Anikrichard | E-mail: anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | URI: http://wwwwww.com | IP: xx.x.xxx.xxx | Date: September 5, 2007

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

On doing IP trace it was found that the IP is associated with Barronhosting.com, a web hosting solution provider. Keith Barron, contact person at Barronhosting, was contacted and the abuse situation was conveyed with a request to sort it out. Keith promptly responded as follows:

I no longer own that IP, but the reverse DNS has never been updated by the datacenter. I would send this report to abuse@gnax.net (they own the IP) and let them know.

An email instantly sent to gnax.net but no response from them yet.

Other posts by Kashif Aziz

• Pakistan edging towards another Military Rule? - Part 1 - August 29th, 2008
• Say No to Electricity Bills - August 28th, 2008
• Tanzeem Naqvi resigned from KESC - August 28th, 2008
• Pakistan faces severe Power Crisis - August 27th, 2008
• NATO Vehicles Burned at Maripur Karachi - August 27th, 2008
• Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her son interrogated by Afghans - August 25th, 2008
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs updates on Dr. Aafia Siddiqui - August 23rd, 2008
• Pervez Musharraf resigns as President of Pakistan - August 18th, 2008
• Clarification by US Consulate in Pakistan on Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's Abducation - August 17th, 2008
• Investors from Pakistan flock to Ajman - August 16th, 2008