Amazon Reviews Hit by Comment Spam
June 25th, 2006 by SecuriTeam, Filed under: Web, Commentary, Spam
I just came across this blog post by Elliott Back where he describes spam at amazon.com:
Even though the user-submitted reviews on Amazon.com are moderated and cannot contain HTML or links, spammers are not deterred. While shopping for a bluetooth mouse I came across the following:
“This is a great product, and you can get it, along with any other products on Amazon up to $500 Free! Participate in this special promotion and get a free $500 Amazon Gift Card at this web site: stuffnocost.com/amazon ”
The reviewer only has a single review to his name. However, Google turns up 100,000 entries for the body of the spam. Now, when someone can get a hundred grand of their spam onto such a big name social ecomerce site as Amazon.com, you know spam’s becoming a giant, pervasive problem.
Fun!
Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.
-
Is your site safe from SQL Injection? Use Active Network Scanning to protect your network!
Subscribe
Subscribe
if amazon reviews all .. reviews.. how did this get through? Doesn’t make sense unless this is real not spam
Yeah, amazon would not let ppl fake their free credit, but still, why would it be on an external URL?
[…] Spam has now arrived on Amazon.com according to a SecuritTeam blog post. […]
[…] Recently we reported how del.icio.us, reddit and even Amazon Reviews were hit by comment spam, but now, it seems like we are moving up in the world. What comes around goes around and apparently the insistence of the search engines to index spam web sites now hurts them as well. […]
WordPress Trackback Spam!!!
I have installed plugins that prevent comment spams, but this won't prevent trackback to be blocked. I've been spam by many
MFA websites that most probably is from the same network with trackback, but they are not linking me on their website. May I
know how do they do it and how do I stop it? Without disabling trackback?
Thanks, and I'm using WordPress.