Internet has been spammed in all possible ways from e-mail boxes to blogs. It looks inevitable to avoid spam. There just seems to be a possibility to reduce spamming.

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer and Head of Web Spam Team has been fighting spam for the last eight years. Speaking to web enthusiasts in the recent Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in San Francisco, he provided ample tips on fighting spam on websites.

He also mentioned that Captcha systems are not secure and that spammers can bypass CAPTCHA systems easier. Matt Cutts also stated how bots are signing up on Blogger accounts and use accounts to advertise their products and services.

Matt Cutts made it clear that search engine optimization is not spam and that Google by no means hates Search Engine Optimization. Cutts also requested web masters to inform Google Webmaster Central sites that use black hat techniques like white texts on white background to bring up search results.

It is reported that MSN Windows Live mail registrations have been hit by spam bots as much as 30% to 35%. This is a serious security issue for Microsoft.

The bot acquires the CAPTCHA on the MSN server, takes it back to the spammers server and is read using spam servers technologies. After successful reading, the text match is sent back to MSN registration form and the registration is done successfully.

Vice President of Security Research, Dan Hubbard stated that this is the first time that we have seen bots like this. He also mentioned that some of the account creation scan is still murky and stated that the team is yet to find out what is happening in the spammers server. He also mentioned that spammers use these addresses for a day and then dispose them. These spamming addresses are quickly shut down by MSN and get listed in spam filtering products.

This huge success rate by spammer bots has started an debate if CAPTCHA is secure. This has lead to rethink CAPTCHA potential. It should also be noted that few months back a Russian programmer stated that he was able to crack Yahoo’s CAPTCHA system 35 percent of the time.

Looks like Google has been ignoring Blogger security issues lately.  Bots are bypassing the human verification step and creating spam blogs automatically. This would be a serious threat to Googles security and Blogger reliability.

CAPTCHA a type of challenge-response test is a verification process where the subscriber has to type the numbers/text that are displayed on an image. This helps find out if the blog has been created by a human being or created automatically by a bot program. CAPTCHA has been used by almost all online registration steps after it was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University  and John Langford from IBM.

It is reported that Google has not yet allocated resources to work on Blogger. The Blogger team is still fixing bugs and gets away with work. This has lead to users opting for Wordpress and other free blogging services present online.

This result in security ignorance could be due to Google having other top priorities which could yield more income to the company.