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Comment spam random text template

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Re: Comment spam random text template

#51

Post by klodolph »

tikhonj wrote: post #6
lenazegher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how easy it is to train a spam filter on, but nested spintax quickly scales to millions of unique output texts. It can be spun at the paragraph, sentence and word level. It's really nasty stuff.

Sure, there can be millions of unique texts, but they all follow certain very similar patterns. That's what would make even a simple naive Bayes filter very effective against them.

I think you're misunderstanding how naïve Bayesian spam filters work. These techniques explicitly do not recognize patterns at all, they just look at vocabulary, and treat each word as a completely independent feature—so they don't even recognize "discount viagra" as a pattern, but merely two independent features "discount" and "viagra".

Re: Comment spam random text template

#52

Post by klodolph »

bcoates wrote: post #3

Isn't a trivial templating system like this a very easy thing to train a bayesian spamfilter on, even without the source template? I guess blogspammers mostly prey on entirely unmaintained sites for something like this to work. But I'm going to have a hard time avoiding using "fastidious!" as a general expression of approval now.

Naïve Bayesian filtering might not work very well on this kind of text. It basically looks like a regular comment, until you start recognizing that it always follows the same pattern. Your basic Bayesian classifier will throw all of the words in a set before analyzing them, which loses all of the information about patterns and word order. The resulting words are considered "independent" which means that even though the template might generate the words "pretty worth bloggers content online" every time it uses the first template, the naïve Bayesian classifier will never figure that part out.

My suspicion is that existing Bayesian classifiers have pushed the spammers to develop more natural-seeming templates, like this one.

Re: Comment spam random text template

#53

Post by hayksaakian »

christiangenco wrote: post #48
Titanous wrote: post #26

Here's a quick script that spins the text. gem install spintax_parser ruby -rspintax_parser -ropen-uri -e 'String.send(:include, SpintaxParser); puts open("https://bit.ly/Ziv9Aw").read.gsub("\n", " ").unspin'

Whoa, `spintax_parser`? ...are there legitimate uses for this?

Perhaps generating contents to use with a testing suite?

Re: Comment spam random text template

#54

Post by hjay »

qeorge wrote: post #8

Its a sad moment when you first have to explain to your mother/client/etc that no, Discount Oakley Sunglasses didn't really enjoy your superb post. Its a shockingly effective spam tactic. People cannot resist praise.

I felt out of the loop not knowing what Discount Oakley Sunglasses was...until I got a spam comment from them just now.

"This article made me become shiny. After reading this article, I learned a lot. I will follow your blog. I wish everyone like me herereap happy, bring in moved...."

I made them become shiny...wow surely this must be authentic?

Re: Comment spam random text template

#55

Post by tomjen3 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #43
SmileyKeith wrote: post #10

I have a friend who works for a large marketing company where they write website content for companies that looks almost identical to this. The company hires hundreds of young writers at a time and pays them minimum wage to come up with a few of these every day. They pass their paragraphs around to other writers who reword it again so it will show up as a unique site for search engines. I call it the spam factory.

What's the company?

By commenting here you just proved that google has trouble identifying these kinds of sites algorithmically.

Re: Comment spam random text template

#56

Post by dennisgorelik »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #43
SmileyKeith wrote: post #10

I have a friend who works for a large marketing company where they write website content for companies that looks almost identical to this. The company hires hundreds of young writers at a time and pays them minimum wage to come up with a few of these every day. They pass their paragraphs around to other writers who reword it again so it will show up as a unique site for search engines. I call it the spam factory.

What's the company?

It could be this company:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22writing+for+blogs+stories...

For example:

-----

http://www.moneymakergroup.com/Jobs-real-Writing-Job-t427002...

Based in Las Vegas, Nevada we are a company looking for qualified individuals to help out with writing tasks such as:

- short stories

- movie scripts

- sales scripts

- articles

- news feeds

- PR websites

- blog posts

.....

-----

Re: Comment spam random text template

#57

Post by matznerd »

bapbap wrote: post #27
lenazegher wrote: post #4

This kind of thing really depresses me. Akismet tells me my blog [1] has had 1,364 spam comments. It's had 22 real comments. [1] http://supplementsos.com/blog/

My site gets about 15,000 spam submissions a month. You are able to make a submission without being logged in but you have to signup as soon as you do for it to be published. Spammers don't do this, so the spam doesn't get published, yet they continue on regardless. I also get spam signups who just signup for an account, some of the more sophisticated accounts will verify their email address but then they don't do an…

Remove any identifiable "footprints" from software you run on your server, like "Powered by wordpress" that should help you out...
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