I guess with the right sort of motivation (and a political agenda), you could make a much more interesting headline out of this URL:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/kiddieporn

Yes, that's the official homepage of the presidential candidate for the US democrats, Barack Obama. No, it's not what it says. It's a page that displays what looks like an embedded video and asks you to "Click here to see movie". When you do that, you are redirected to another site that tells you that you need to download a codec to see the video. Of course, that "codec" is a trojan that infects your (Windows) PC. So don't do that ... read more

A few days ago, one of our registered users suddenly started posting comment spam (for pills / drugs). This doesn't happen a lot, but isn't too unusual either. For obvious reasons, we only allow comment posts for registered users, and so occasionally a spammer registers with the site just to post spam.

What was odd about this case, however, was that the user had registered with our site back in August 2004(!) and, before the spamming, last logged in September 2004.

So at first, I was assuming the worst: A hacked account. Hunting through our logs and database backups didn't bring up any evidence for a hacked account, though. And then another of our users independently reported the same thing happening on his site. On comparing the details of the two spammer accounts, it became evident that it was the same person. It seems someone has been planning this well in advance. read more

For several days now, we are getting referrer spam for websites registered to a

    Stumpp, Semmy  semmy@semmy.com
    Apartado 297
    Maspalomas, Las Palmas 35100
    ES
    +01.4678139969

The site names speak for themselves, I think: freelinkpopularity.com, freeaffiliatecoach.com, and a few others. A Google search for the name Semmy Stumpp brings up more of that crap. The spam is coming from IP addresses belonging to Spanish ISP Telefonica and doesn't change too often, so he's probably using his own internet connection to spam.

The user agent for all his requests is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98), but it's some kind of bot and actually blocked by Bad Behavior due to some HTTP violation.

The sites are mostly self-promotion, but he does have Google ads there (AdSense id pub-6352261802465565) and some suspicious-looking JavaScripts ...

Some spams are so stupid you have to wonder whether they're real or a Joe Job ...

Referrer spam for erollins.net, articlegroup.com, turnkeyprofitsites.com, Home-Phone-Service.com, all four of which are registered to

   David Rollins
   Tim Rollins
   dgr1040@hotmail.com
   3607-10 Matthews Mint Hill Roa
   Matthews, NC 28105 US
   +1.7048471040

The first site is obviously their homepage: They are accountants. The spam came from 166.82.31.14 which belongs to CTC Internet Services, Inc., Concord, NC. Spamming from your home office, guys?

The sites are all hosted at 216.180.243.186, which belongs to Global Net Access, Atlanta. Also known as GNAX, this is a provider who's either clueless or one of the bad guys. In any case, it doesn't surprise me that they would host a spammer's site.

German IT news site heise.de reports (in German) about a new variant of AdSense abuse: Bloggers in Germany have received emails (one is quoted here, in German again) from a certain M. Adams of nimzoservices.com stating that his "service" has been slowly increasing the AdSense revenue for the blogger's site and that they now expect to get half of that revenue in return. Should the blogger choose not to comply, then he would "risk his AdSense account and all revenues so far". In other words, they are threatening to increase the click rate so that Google would take notice and cancel the blogger's AdSense account. In yet another word: Extortion.

Google has apparently already been notified and the bloggers have already tracked down a Reimund Lutzenberger as the real person behind this scam. Mr. Lutzenberger is running my-nebenjob.com, a site seeking freelancers for "quality assurance and marketing analysis" of websites.