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Spam is big business and spammers, like all business owners, are always looking for new ways to lower costs, increase profits and get their products in front of more people. The efficiency of today’s spam filters and the fact that most Internet users have been trained to ignore any of the junk that does get through their filters had made that job much harder for the spammers. This is forcing spammers to find new methods of polluting the Internet. For years they’ve been using the comment fields on blogs and news sites to push their junk. Now they’re taking that one step further.
Unbelivably, many spammers have large staffs of people working on nothing but building completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. These spammers use these personas to create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other sites that have high levels of user interaction.
Easily identifiable spambots and fake profiles have been cluttering these sites from the beginning. But, these created personas have all of the attributes you would expect in a real user, such as clearly defined interests, specific geographic locations, and favorite bands and movies. The spammers who control these profiles are not using them to loudly push diet pills or porn. Instead, they are aiming to make them look as average as possible.
“Their goal is to be right down the middle, not too high or too low on the radar,” said Robert Hansen, a security researcher who discussed the new tactics during a webinar Wednesday put on by Black Hat and Dark Reading. Hansen, who has spoken with some of the spammers using these techniques, said that they can create as many as 500,000 to a million new personas in a single day!
“It’s going to be extraordinarily difficult for the operators of these social networking platforms to identify fake users,” Hansen said. “This could create a huge amount of havoc and strife on these sites. But they don’t want to stand out too much. This could spell disaster for anyone trying to figure out what’s real or fake.”
This tactic could be especially effective on a site such as Twitter where users rely heavily on shortened URLs that are difficult to identify without clicking. Most of the spammers on Twitter are simple to identify right now because they have few or no followers and just post porn links or scam offers. But once they start taking the time to build followings with seemingly legitimate messages for days or weeks, things will get much messier.
In order to keep yourself protected, My Tech Team suggests only following or “friending” people that you know. If you’re on any of these social sites to get to know other people, don’t click on their links. After carrying on a short conversation with them, It will be apparent if they are spammers or not.
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Nice article, these spammers will stop at nothing will they.