Comments on: “Online Pharmacy” Spam Stalks Internet Forums/Boards

By: Jenifer26

Jenifer26 — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:40:45 +0000

Spam trackers should find more ways to track down fake pharmacies, online gambling, adult dating sites, etc.
How can we protect against hackers?

By: anirban

anirban — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:11:28 +0000

If you are using a CMS like wordpress and such, there are free plugins like Akismet which try to weed out spam comments. Unfortunately due to the complex ways in which spam can be inserted, it should be assumed that a blog/board will always have some amount of spam in it. If a monitoring service can point out the spam in the pages then a webmaster can easily delete the offending comments and ban the IP and user, or something similar.

By: Pharmacy Guide

Pharmacy Guide — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:40:10 +0000

Its a great post. Just one question-How do you stop the spam advertising.

************

Alyssa

By: admin

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:20:30 +0000

@Jannese The only way to avoid comment spam when using blogger seems to be to enable "Word Verification" (a captcha) or enable comment moderation. I recommend using both. More information from Blogger: Preventing Unwanted Comments and Comment Spam If you are using WordPress, you have the option of signing up for Akismet. Akismet is a free plug-in that automatically blocks common spam. Of course, even with WordPress, they only surefire way to avoid posting of spam is to moderate all comments.

By: anirban

anirban — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:20:19 +0000

There are multiple ways to stop this: (1) using plugins like akismet for WP (2) blacklisting the IPs (used to post the spam ) using access to the web server (.htaccess etc..) (3) using a monitoring service which intimates you if a spam link has been posted to your blog.

Of course the details will depend on the kind of CMS, configurations that you have.

Hope this helps,
-A

By: Jannese

Jannese — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:01:10 +0000

How do yo stop the spam advertising. My blog comments are being used as a way to leave advertisement for xlpharmacy. I contacted them and they claimed they have nothing to do with it. OH course the person I talk to was some poor sale person that had no idea.

By: PharmacySitesSuck

PharmacySitesSuck — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:43:56 +0000

@Heidi ALL PHARMACY RELATED WEBSITES ARE CRAP AND SPEW TONS OF SPAM

By: Heidi

Heidi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:27:58 +0000

247-pharmacy.com does not send spam! Also this site has been update and is certified McAfee Secure so I do not know why you have placed our site on here?!

By: anirban

anirban — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:18:44 +0000

“The URL’s you referenced are for the most part harmless sites” agreed, and good observation.

Most forums and blogs can be secured to a high degree by simply “keeping up to date”, Wordpress for example consistently patches and improves upon known issues in each release. Unfortunately most admins seem to not be able to upgrade as quickly as they should, thereby leaving open doors for code-injection attacks.

Furthermore, new attacks are always leveraging 0-day flaws, and unpublished weaknesses. There is little one can do to protect against them, even WAFs can’t be bullet-proof. Regular Monitoring and adherence to established good-security-practices should help though.

Thanks for the reply on the WOT forum, much appreciated.

By: g7w

g7w — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:03:42 +0000

Forum spam by fake pharmacies, online gambling, adult dating site, etc is nothing new. There are forum spam trackers that proffer spammer blacklists to forum admins.

The URL’s you referenced are for the most part harmless sites, there are a couple I’ve recognized that could be “dangerous” but most of the links are victim sites, albeit poorly moderated, but none the less harmless.

It’s always a good idea for people, when seeing *any advertisement* to be weary of clicking on the link(s), as would be the case if these links were presented in emails.

I suppose my question is: How or with what would you suggest to prevent forums and blogs from being victimized in such a way?

I’ve replied to your post on the WOT Forum with a quick dig resulting from one domain name obtained by visiting one of the referenced URL’s

http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/5404–online-pharmacy-spam-a-brief-analysis