spammers

Junk e-mails sent across the globe were visibly reduced today as a web hosting firm considered to be a major host for organizations engaged in spam activities was taken offline.

McColo Corp, a U.S hosting service has its state-of-the-art 30 story office in San Jose, California. Would you ever believe that this was the base for all cyber crime offenses including remote management of millions of compromised computers to sell fake security products, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and child pornography through emails, newsletters, adware’s and various forums.

E-mail security firls like IronPort reported a reduction of 66 percent of spam during Tuesday. Spamcop reported 25 percent reduction of spam e-mails every second.

However, U.S Justice Department mentions that web hosting providers cannot be held responsible for illegal activities in their networks except if it involves child pornography and copyright violations. Global Crossing, a Bermuda-based company with operations in New Jersey was one of the companies providing Internet to McColo. However, Global Crossing claims that it co-operates fully with law enforcement and security researchers to address malicious activities.

It is surprising to know that a company with such a large internet spam presence was not detected, stopped or penalized by the U.S law enforcement or the U.S Secret Service.

Sphinn must have had too much spam submitters. Sphinn has made its new links on the site to have a nofollow attribute.

Spammers have been posting their links on the upcoming topics where voters can bring in traffic to their site. This Resulted in passing the page rank of Sphinn to its linked destination sites.

Sphinn came up with this idea in its Third Door Media meeting held in June. During the discussion, the issue with spammers and nofollow was discussed. This topic was brought to the moderators who then decided to have nofollow attributes for the site.

Experts feel though Sphinn has taken the right step to stop spam, this step can even kill the social media site. Sphinn would loose a huge amount of members who regularly post on the website. Some submitters would post good articles and also wish to have a link to the article for mutual benefits. These kind of submitters would be irritated and would no longer use Sphinn and might move to another social media site now that there are hundereds of other Social Media sites now available.

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.