spam

The difference between SEO and Spam…

October 25, 2011 By Dan Thornton

There’s occasionally some confusion and complaints about SEO as being the cause of spam on the internet with irrelevant content being returned in search results because of unethical techniques. The problem is that within any industry you’ll get good, ethical people who work hard at what they do, and bad, unethical people who use tricks to get quick results and run with the cash.

But if you’re still concerned about spammy SEO and you should be optimising what you do, a new video by Google’s Head of Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts should help:

Good SEO takes time, effort and skill to ensure that relevant content and products are correctly returned for relevant search terms. Bad SEO promises to get you to #1 on Google by using every trick in the book.

And I’ll always practise and recommend good, ethical ‘white hat’ SEO practices for one simple reason – they give better, more cost effective and longterm results. By following the best practice recommendations of search engines, you don’t have to worry about getting found out, or getting your spam technique negated by an update, and having everything wiped out or penalised overnight. You’ll also have a solid foundation to build your business on, and as part of the work you’ll be improving the content and results in related areas, such as conversion rates and social media engagement.

And if you ever need advice, feel free to get in touch!

New Twitter spam attack

August 6, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Just picked up on a warning via Mashable that 1000s of Twitter profiles appear to have been compromised in the latest attack of spam messages on the microblogging platform.

The attacks seem to be producing waves of spam messages, with hundreds of tweets, and then stopping for a while before starting again. The cause hasn’t been identified and the Twitter team have been informed.

Luckily in this case, the url in question hasn’t been masked with a shortening service, so don’t go to high-profits.org unless you fancy risking your account.

If your account has been compromised, change your password immediately etc…

And finally, think about how you might be affected – is the risk of spam and phishing scams a natural balance to adding 1000s of follows and followers that you don’t know, in order to boost your popularity?

Do you RT without checking links first? Click on links from people you haven’t established any reputation with?

I’m not saying close contacts can’t make a mistake and have their account hacked or phished – it’s happened to several friends with online email accounts – but commons sense and building trusted relationships will definitely lessen the odds of you being affected…

Twitter starts filtering links to malware

August 3, 2009 By Dan Thornton

As more and more people use Twitter, so the number of spam/porn messages has increased – partly due to users succumbing to the numbers game and blindly following and re-tweeting anything they see.

So it’s a good move for Twitter to start blocking malware, as spotted by the F-Secure blog earlier today – making the service a little safer for the less-savvy.

It seems that the filtering itself comes via Bit.ly, checking against spam filters SURBL and Google Safe Browsing, and then adding a warning, as shown in the screen below from F-Secure (Obviously I don’t know any dodgy sites!):

Why we fall for ‘Don’t Click This’

February 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

A recent spam attack on Twitter was entirely based around spreading a link with the words ‘Don’t click this’ – which of course, plenty of people did.

It led quite a lot of people to ask why anyone would click on a link which says ‘Don’t Click This’.

And that reminded me of a programme by Derren Brown on this very subject, with his usual mix of psychology, illusion and trickery.

Annoying Channel 4 in it’s infinite wisdom has disabled embedding of the very clip I wanted to share.

So ‘Don’t Click’ this link to view a video Channel 4 would rather people didn’t see, spread, share and use to promote the television series they paid to commission. Sadly the whole show isn’t available, including the later demonstrations with adults, and more explanation of how exactly he puts the ideas into the subject’s head in the most suggestive way.

I’m sure there are more clinical examples in the psychology field – which reminds me why Rich Millington recommended some psychology reading and blogs in his Online Community Building Manifesto.

So make sure you don’t subscribe to my RSS feed, don’t recommend this post via Stumbleupon, Digg, or Delicious, and don’t retweet it!

Twitter phishing attack – the implications

January 5, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Twitter has been hit by the first major effort to ‘phish‘ account details and spam users with links to a fake login page by Direct Messages from comprimised accounts.

The Twitter team has responded with a warning on the main web access page, and a warning on the Twitter blog. You can see the uproar it’s causing on Twitter via Twitter Search.

Currently the DMs are enticing people with:

Here’s a funny blog about you
Your picture is on this blog
You’ve won a free iphone

Luckily the phishers are at least sticking to the grand tradition of email spamming by either trying to entice you with a blatantly ‘too good to be true’ offer, or something personal with the link to a fake Twitter log-in page displayed in full, so hopefully the word has spread to most people.

However, this is likely to be just the start. As Pete Cashmore pointed out at Mashable, this is a sign Twitter has reached a big enough size to be a viable target for scams – a positive sign for Twitter’s growth perhaps, but also a sign that the scammers and spammers are coming, with pretty big implications for Twitter users.

Shortened urls:

For starters, we were all lucky in some ways that the bloggers obviously aren’t familiar with Twitter culture, and were displaying the full url of the fake website, meaning that even if the DM came from someone we absolutely trusted, we had a warning before clicking.

But given that the character limit of Twitter means that shortened urls are the norm, it will make it almost impossible to detect whether a link is likely to be fake before at least visiting it – meaning an urgent need for preview functionality of shortened urls at the bare minimum.

Warning systems:

A lot of Twitter users picked up on the scam emails via friends, and stayed up to date with information via the #phishing hash tag etc – Twitter responded promptly with a warning on the website and blog. But what about the many, many people using a client to access Twitter and their Direct Messages? And those using mobiles to access the service?

Will everyone get a warning via each client and application? Unlikely at the moment, unless there is a type of ’emergency signal’ which could be broadcast across all clients and apps.

Verified App Store:

Which brings me to the next possible implication – a few people have suggested that the fake log in page is in fact working as a Twitter application to utilise the stolen accounts and passwords.

It’s long been a matter of contention for users and app developers that any 3rd party application which requires a certain level of functionality has to ask for usernames and passwords – but now the 3rd party developers could be hit by a huge loss of trust from users.

So could this be an opportunity for a verified and approved Twitter application resource? Possibly monetised by charging a fee for consumers (unlikely), or for developers to have their application tested and approved (more likely)?

This could have implications for the speed and amount of Twitter applications and clients being produced, and also move such development away from bedroom coders depending on the fees for such services.

It certainly means that there could be a move for more users to utilise more than one Twitter account to allow them to test applications and clients etc without comprimising their main account.

So what other implications do you think the arrival of large scale phishing attacks could have on Twitter – and what suggestions do you have for other Tweeple – and Twitter itself, to try to minimise the damage of future attacks?