Follow-up to Spam Blogs

It had been a few weeks after I found out the previous Blogger subdomain of my site was maliciously occupied by a spam blog which not only filled with random content, it also shown deceiving full-screen ad that claims to be anti-spyware but actually attempts to install malicious software in your computer.

So I had filed a spam complaint to Blogger, and the next day the first thing I saw is the deceiving full-screen ad was gone, doesn't automatically attempt to install malicious software, but the page still remained intact with spam. Then I sort of let the issue slide.

Then today, out of curiosity, I revisited my old real-estate and pleasantly surprised that apparently Blogger had closed down the previous site and open it up for others to occupy it. Apparently it seemed that Hayden had picked it up and posted his new blog there, which is also a computer tech blog and the content seemed very promising. Looking forward to read more from him/her. :)

Other than that, I'm glad that Blogger was fast to resolve and had actually taken steps to get rid of spam blogs. Despite the fact that I didn't follow things up on a daily basis, but the fact that they took action is commendable. Good job! :)

Spam Blogs

Once upon a time, The Digital Blue Wave does not resides at the same URL as what it is today: I migrated it to another "virtual real estate" (read: subdomain) in the same "neighbourhood" (Blogger).

Apparently months later after the move, my friend, Eng Lee told me that my old space was occupied. Just out of curiosity, I paid the newcomer a visit. And boy I was surprised!

Nastily surprised, in fact.

Yes, you probably could have guessed it: it has become a spam blog, much worse than one, in fact. It's pretty funny to see how creative those spammers had become, and in the end of the "scan", they even attempted to give me a fishy download file, which that could anything but a nice present for your computer. (well... unless you liked the idea of having your computer spied on)

And they are smart enough for not making it easy to report it as inappropriate (you know, there's a "Flag as inappropriate" button on the Blogger navigation bar on top that you can click on). Even with my attempts of not letting the mock malware scanning screen shown by disabling all graphics, CSS and Javascript, the "Flag as inappropriate" button is no where to be seen! O_O

I have to say that spammers are really a smart shady bunch indeed.

In the end, after rummaging around with Google, I finally found Blogger's spam reporting page (really, they should have make it more.... umm, visible). Just filed my report and let's see how long does it take for Blogger to respond to that one.

In the meantime, I got around to install GreaseMonkey and a script to make sure the damn flag is not made hidden by those hideous spammers. Hope that would greatly help me to weed out those spam blogs as soon as I see one.