Invasion of the spambots

From blog spam to pornbots, new strains of computer programs aimed at pumping up Google page ranks just keep on coming.

By Sam Williams

June 8, 2004 | For Lawrence Kestenbaum, the realization that a new species of intelligent agent -- or "bot" -- was prowling the Internet first dawned about two years ago.

It was about that time, Kestenbaum says, that a series of "fluke" addresses started popping up in the HTTP referrer log of his personal Web site, the historical cemetery database Political Graveyard.

"If you're at all concerned with how your Web site is being received, you're almost compulsively checking the logs to see who's coming in and from where," says Kestenbaum, laying the scene. "You get to know what sites are linking to you. Anything new gets your attention."

Even more attention-grabbing, Kestenbaum adds, was the fact that the fluke referrals came in bunches. Curious, Kestenbaum pasted in the URL and went to look. His disappointment was immediate. Expecting something interesting, he instead found a page filled with nothing but banner and pop up ads.

For a moment, Kestenbaum says, he suspected a glitch. How else could one explain a dozen or so Internet browsers flipping directly from a site boasting zero unpaid content to one documenting historical graveyards? It didn't make sense.

"That's when I had this 'Aha' moment," says Kestenbaum. "I'd visited the site because of the very technique they'd used to advertise it. Somebody had taken the trouble to write a program that would plant strange links in referrer logs knowing that the people curious enough to check those logs would also be curious enough to follow the link.

Scary as it may seem, spam is evolving. The automated, Web-spidering technology that delivers bulk c1alis and vi@gra ads to your daily e-mail in box has mutated into a dozen variants, targeting everything from cellphones to blogs to instant messenger accounts. Feeding off the two divergent trends in online publishing -- increased specialization of content and increased generalization in the use of basic software tools such as Google, AIM and Movable Type -- many of these mutations no longer even demand your attention. In some cases, a place to hide in a chat room or forum is the only thing they need.

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