Got interesting comment spam this morning from someone using the name \"Robert.\" He or she posted two comments (one on an old entry, one on a new one) that were vaguely on-topic and appeared to have been written by a human rather than a bot. (And had an email address allegedly from Bulgaria, but an IP address from Canada.) But both of them contained an inline image tag that pointed to a JPG image called \"spacer.jpg\" on the spammer's website--and if you loaded that image, it redirected to another site, with a domain name that appeared to have something to do with Amazon's Associate program.<\/p>\n
I imagine Amazon won't look kindly on this use of their name in a domain name (it didn't appear to be an official site), but it's not worth my time to report it to them.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it wasn't clear to me how this approach was going to make money for the spammer, but I imagine they had something in mind. So I figured it was worth posting about: if any of you are getting the usual sort of not-quite-relevant comments from total strangers, might be worth looking at the raw HTML for some of those comments, to see if any of them include an invisible \"image.\"<\/p>\n
(One reason I didn't really notice these comments at first is that I do get these kinds of slightly off-kilter comments from random strangers all the time, without the image tags; and unlike a lot of such comments, these two weren't actively abusive or nasty.)<\/p>\n
Oh, and \"Robert,\" if your comments somehow weren't actually spam, feel free to drop me a note in email explaining all the mysterious circumstances, and I'll consider reinstating them (without the image tags).<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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