Vanity Search Spamming

“How did you meet? Did you select her, or was it vice versa?”

- Robert Redford to Brad Pit, Spy Game

Fraudsters 101: The best way to win the confidence of someone who they think is for them to contact you. Scammers love to have contact with their potential victims.

Now it seems that spammers have figured out a way to draw interest from potential victims to their website, in a way that is much easier than sending millions of spam e-mails.

The idea is simple: we collect a person’s name from places like LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networking and put it on a webpage. It does not really matter where, while Google indexes.

Wait a minute, and it is a good chance that the person by Google. Many (including myself) have a “Google Alert” on their behalf they are sent an updated list of links to new pages that mention his name.

Everybody likes to see it was mentioned that when you click on the link. And voila! They come to the spammer site. In some cases I have seen, the name was gone from the page (but was still in Google’s cache). But it does not matter: as soon as the person that came to hand, web spammer’s job is done – got your message in front of you, and maybe even dig deeper into your site trying to find out what the connection is you.

There are many advantages to this method. First, you’re not limited by the message: the open web page can have the words in your credit card debt and mortgage assistance without the fear of launching anti-spam software. In addition, people pay more attention to the side, because I think it has to do with them.

Statistics do not understand marketing spammer, but I’m sure the infamous spam text “came to our attention that you are in need of financial assistance”, which sounds very similar to a candid personal message, is a great success. But that message has to get through spam filters and include a real email address and a correct surname first /. The site of the spam is not necessary to avoid spam filters, and you have the correct name. In addition, you get interesting information about the visitor: browser version, IP location and of course, the name you want (which would be the “sender”, which is sent automatically by the browser to the site). Oh, and of course – it is cheap. Just put together a nice website, and wait for Google to do the rest. No purchase of mailing lists and no cost to send spam (which today is the cost of employing a zombie botnet for a couple of days).

For prospective swindler who read this, you must understand that it is not foolproof. Apparently, it requires people to do a search on the name of vanity, in the first place (even if it works in humans to date for Google, their parents or teachers). It also requires time – days, weeks or months (which can be hard on your site in a zombie computer that might disappear from the index once Google and the user enters the site). But because the costs are minimal, and no effective action right now, I think we will see more and more attacks in the near future.

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