by Andy T » Wednesday Apr 25, 2007 9:54 pm
Pale_Ale wrote:Emo wrote:pacman wrote:ZERO views is the only way of discouraging these cretins.
No it doesn't. They are done by spambots (programs), not by people. They don't care whether anyone looks at them or not.
I believe the number of views are monitored by the software and then relayed back so they can determine where they are best to concentrate their efforts. If they get zero views at a forum this could discourage the bots.
This is because most of the time the spam is to generate advertising dollars etc.
I believe there is no feedback once the link has been posted. It would take more effort ( and resources ) for them to constantly keep track of all posts on all forums they are spamming to just to estimate the most popular posts. Most of those posts are very shortlived anyway, on all forums. It is much cheaper to do this fire-and-forget style. All you need is to search for a particular type of forum software and apply a standard technique - no human intervention required for either.
I also believe this kind of spam often serves as a delivery device to plant a trojan to recruit more zombie computers into bad guys' botnets.
[quote="Pale_Ale"][quote="Emo"][quote="pacman"]
ZERO views is the only way of discouraging these cretins.[/quote]
No it doesn't. They are done by spambots (programs), not by people. They don't care whether anyone looks at them or not.[/quote]
I believe the number of views are monitored by the software and then relayed back so they can determine where they are best to concentrate their efforts. If they get zero views at a forum this could discourage the bots.
This is because most of the time the spam is to generate advertising dollars etc.[/quote]
I believe there is no feedback once the link has been posted. It would take more effort ( and resources ) for them to constantly keep track of all posts on all forums they are spamming to just to estimate the most popular posts. Most of those posts are very shortlived anyway, on all forums. It is much cheaper to do this fire-and-forget style. All you need is to search for a particular type of forum software and apply a standard technique - no human intervention required for either.
I also believe this kind of spam often serves as a delivery device to plant a trojan to recruit more zombie computers into bad guys' botnets.