August 2006 Archives

In a recent post, I described some strange image spam that has been arriving recently. The images appear to be nearly blank, consisting simply of a white background marked by a few random lines. I assumed that this was just another spammer screw-up, and wondered how long it would be before the spammer noticed and the tide of garbage images stopped. The answer is that we may be seeing these things for a while yet. They aren't an accident at all.

Currently, a spammer seems to be expending a great deal of energy to send out embedded images that just consist of a white background with a few randomly-colored and -positioned diagonal lines. It's possible that this is some subtle ploy to disable image-savvy filters but it's more likely to be just another spammer screw-up. The spams are probably meant to be stock spams, as they resemble some recent spams promoting WBRS.PK. He must be wondering why whatever he's advertising isn't taking off ...

Technorati's David Sifry has published some statistics about the blogosphere, giving a round-up of current numbers and trends. Among the interesting facts in his post: 70% of 'pings' sent to Technorati to announce new blog postings come from known spam sources, and between 8% and 30% of new blogs created are 'splogs' (spam blogs). That 30% peak figure represents 50,000 blogs per hour. Spamming the blogosphere is a high-volume business.