Sometimes Spammers Lose

Everyone gets spam email – certainly I get more than my fair share. Because my email address appears in so many places on the web (this site for instance has thousands of instances of my email address ready for the plucking), I’m easily added to spammers’ lists.

Since January 1, 2004, I have received 22,347 spam emails. That’s over 63% of the total that have made it to my inbox. There are countless thousands more that never even get that far. They are screened by a few dozen brute force filters which discard obvious spam at my server.

There’s another spam I get – comment spam. That’s when people (actually machines) send comments to my blog so their website addresses will be posted. Their hope (sneaky but clever) is Google will see them on lots of websites and mistakenly believe they’re important.

Today, I’ve gotten dozens of these comment spams from a poker site. Filters I have installed for that purpose (and which don’t work anywhere near as well as the email spam filters) stopped them dead in their tracks.

Out of curiosity, I went to the site to see who was doing this. The site’s name was very close to a legitimate poker site and I wanted to know if they were responsible.

Here’s what I saw:

I’ll bet the spam was still being spit out after their site had been closed down! Hopefully, they were paying someone for this exercise in futility.

The bottom line is, no matter what small security hole exists, there will always be someone willing to exploit it. All you need is a lack of scruples and moral fiber…and someone who knows how to program.