Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way. And likely, if there’s a will, there’s money. We’ve all felt the effects of spam in our email, but some of you may have never seen the amount of spam posted to blogs. Once a day I have to moderate comments with content similar to that of spam email. While that may not sound like much, I am grossly understating the achievement of finding my blog. Try googling for “blog” and you will not find my site easily.

The level of sophistication necessary to post spam on blogs is very high: find a blog, find a post, click to comment, paste in the spam, click to add the comments, and repeat. Anyone with the skills to do so could be gainfully employed as a programmer. What does it say that some would choose to be spammers instead? Hmmm…

Truth be told, a lot of spam is created by script kiddies who download an easy-to-use hacking kit and start doing their thing. There’s something inherently strange about trusting a stranger to furnish tools specifically for illegal, or at least maligned, activity. For example, this story gives details on how a hacking group released a phishing kit that benefits the original group as much as the script kiddie using the package.

Spam is not going away until we make it unprofitable. Although it is hard to stop, please do the world a favor and stop buying all those penis pills you heard about from the stranger online.

UPDATE: This post was more about my continuing amazement with nefarious people, but Lane informed me of the Akismet plugin to fight comment spam which the nice folks at Wordpress talk about here.

Apparently GUI automation tools are so easy to use that any decent programmer can develop a script to post spam arbitrarily. Very clever. Very cool. Luckily, the counter measure to comment-spam is equally elegant.

Ahhh, and a good chuckle because the first comment on this post was spam…