Spam is something most people will never get rid of or stop. It is essentially impossible to stop spam with todays current implementation of the Internet. One of the reasons this is so difficult, is because the medium itself has become spam.
For the average user, spam means a few minutes each day filtering their email, and cleaning out their junk mail folder if they have a third party spam program or setup. But spam goes way beyond email. Forums, message boards, guestbooks, and blogs are all vulnerable to spam. But what happens when other services you rely on start getting taken over and used to advertise/spam the Internet? Ever go to a wiki, only to find five hundred links for viagra and other drug offers? What about viewing a friends profile on a forum, or visiting a friends Twitter account that has been taken over by someone else?
One such service I have seen taken over lately, (and its not exactly new, but interesting in how they get you) is YouTube. Thats right people, your favorite viral video site is now a haven for SPAM(not that it wasn’t already). How they deliver that spam is another issue. For instance, you go to view someones blog, they often require you to enter an email address as verification. This more often than not is either fake, or a legit users email that has been harvested from the internet. They also often have a field for your website. Now most spammers use the comment field to load you up on your favorite cialis and viagra sites, but lately they have gotten wise to fill in the website URL field with more spam links, but to sites you would normally trust. One such link was to a YouTube account, only once you got there, it was like a RickRoll, only instead of seeing Rick Astley shaking his hips, you get an advertisement for the spammer. Then in the description for their video, a link to the spammers site, drawing you further down the rabbit’s hole, only Alice is not a part of this story…
Using trusted sites as links from a comment spammer are tricks that they can use to get their message delivered. While posting this URL and leaving comments that fall into the grey area of flattery, often complimenting you on your site and saying how, now they will visit often, they give the owner a sense of trust and confidence, often allowing the spam to stay on their site, since they fail to check the URL’s from spam. This can then end up on the authors site, unchecked and often unknown to the author that the link for their site is itself where the real spam lies.
When services like YouTube start being used to propagate spam, it becomes harder to discern legitimate sites from those of spammers. Eroding web services to the point that you fear to click anything you see defeats the use of the internet itself and what it has to offer the end user, but know this, so long as there is an Internet, their will be spam.
Oh, and if you are interested, search YouTube for “Bad Credit Auto Loan,Bad Credit Auto Loans,Bad Credit Autos Loan”, so you can see how these spammers are working it these days. Should be the first video to come up. I don’t suggest you follow their links though, and you do so at your own risk…