November 1, 2008Spammers Going Google
Comments (5) Google has a big challenge. Their blogger service is overrun with splogs. (And they don’t make it very easy to report them either.) Their web site search results have become polluted with people playing keyword and page rank games. And now their gmail service is being used to register spam accounts on phpBB boards. As of last month gmail is in second place for spammer registrations blocked by my Checkbox Challenge on one particular board. If I use only 2008 data gmail is essentially in a tie with mail.ru for most spam registration attempts.
Here is a graph showing registration attempts since May of 2007 for one of my domains. I have only displayed the top five domains based on their cumulative total.
The red line in the graph is from mail.ru. As shown in the graph they have been the top source for blocked registration attemps for many years. Since May, 2007, mail.ru has averaged 144 registration attempts per month. Since January 2008 their average is 148. So their activity over the past 18 months has been relatively constant.
Compare that to the numbers for gmail for the same period. The domain gmail.com averages 84 blocked attempts when I include data from May, 2007 to October, 2008. However, if I look at more recent trends and include only January 2008 to October the average jumps to 141. This shows that gmail spam is clearly on the rise.
Here is another chart that shows the percentage breakdown of the top-five sources for registration spammers:
The domain gmail.com is clearly on the rise as far as percentage of spammer registration attemps.
Google, can you fix this?
Related Links
- Report Spam Blog for Blogger
- Download source data used for this post in XLS format
Comments (5)
Sure is nice to see Google’s massive computing power being put to use to spam most of the entire world. Now I start to see why some people don’t like how big Google has gotten…
Comment by Dog Cow — November 3, 2008 @ 11:46 am
It’s all driven by the Quest for Revenues.
Google created this mess when they started their Adsense program. Now it seems some web sites are created for no other purpose than to host ads. I’m not trying to be hypocritical here as I do have Google ads on some of my sites, as I have posted about before. I believe that the difference is that I do provide content, and I worked hard to get to the point where it was worth setting up ads.
Notice that there are no ads on this site (phpbbdoctor.com).
I don’t intend to put any unless I have to do so in order to keep the site running.
I went off on a long rant about Google in the General Discussion area at phpbb.com. I should see if I can find the posts and recreate them as a blog entry.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — November 3, 2008 @ 4:47 pm
Go ahead and recreate them. The day I have Google ads on Mac GUI is the day it becomes PC GUI.
Comment by Dog Cow — November 3, 2008 @ 5:28 pm
Heh. In a word, “Never” right?
Comment by Dave Rathbun — November 3, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
Indeed. The fact that they scan my site for keywords bother me. I don’t like other people placing tracking devices on my site. It’s bad enough I get some many darned robots and spiders and other crap sucking down my bandwidth, plus the numbskulls who try out their moronic Joomla exploits and wordpress hacks, and god knows what other *****ty open-source software exploits every day of every week on my site.
Comment by Dog Cow — November 4, 2008 @ 2:15 pm