Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, spam in blogs is becomming huge these days along with search engine spam and mobile phone messaging spam.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge.
Blog Spam or “blam” for short is spamming on webblogs. This type of spam takes advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging sftware by placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commerical web site.
Blogs such as TechCrunch have caught over 1 million spam comments. For most blogs such as this one and AskStudent, the protection from such Blog Spam like TechCrunch is Akismet.
Today, I saw a new method of Blog Spam by these spammers. They are using TinyURL, a very popular web service which provides short aliases to long URLs. TinyURL inspite of its benefits has had to face the criticism that they are opaque, hiding the ultimate destination from a web user. This opaqueness is now being leveraged by spammers, who can use such link in spam and thus bypassing URL blacklists.
UPDATE:
TinyURL has blocked the above site stating that they abused their policy. How does one deal with such spam? Post in comments area.
Related Articles:
1. How to hide your email address from spammers, a thorough guide
2. How a PayPal phishing email looks like and how to detect it
3. Top phishing targets are Ebay and PayPal followed by Banks
4. References: Wikipedia article on spammer
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