Posts Tagged ‘spam’

Gmail is Slow; Delicious is Spammed

May 9th, 2010

If you are a Gmail user, you might have experienced the horrors of awful slowness in your inbox lately. Gmail problems include: extremely long load times (we are talking 10 minutes in some cases), messages that are late to arrive, problems downloading attachments and problems with sending messages.

These issues arise in all browsers and all operating systems.

This situation has been going on for a while. Users are complaining all over the so-called Google help forums – and to no avail. Google says nothing, and the only help these poor users get is a link to the unhelpful Gmail is Slow page. Trust me guys – you can’t blame Norton Anti-Virus for this one! Twitter, too, is full of complaints about Gmail, and still no official word from Google.

The rumors say that Google has been compromised by hackers and that their servers took a real hit – but they won’t admit it. Since Google has no customer service to speak of, it seems that we will just have to wait for this mysterious situation to resolve itself.

Delicious Spam Attack

No, this is not a funky name for an even funkier recipe – this ain’t no cooking blog, fellas. Anyway, on a more serious note – Delicious, the social bookmarking site (which I love deeply) has fallen victim to a vicious spam attack. If you take a peek at the Popular Bookmarks page, which is usually a great place to see what’s hot on the web, you’ll see that it’s filled with filthy spam articles in all languages.

At first, this also affected aggregators like Popurls and Oursignal, but they seem to be filtering out the crap right now.

There’s no official response from Delicious/Yahoo on this matter.

Something is rotten in the state of the interwebs, my friends. First it’s disgusting “Like” buttons – now a slow/hacked Gmail and a spammed Delicious. Thank God there are still funny cats around!

qq829.com: Malicious Scripts or Spam from China?

April 18th, 2010

Website managers from all over the world are reporting some weird referrers from qq829.com to their sites. If you are following your site stats on a daily basis, you might have come across some peculiar and unexplained traffic from China, from a link that looks like this:

http://qq829.com/web_stat.asp?dn=domainname.com

The domain itself, qq829.com, is Chinese and linked to http://new.cnzz.com – a known spammy domain. It’s hard to make sense of the site itself. Some information about the site can be found here.

At the moment, there aren’t certain answers as for what this link is, if it’s malicious or just Splog or spam. Currently, the most helpful source of information about this, is a discussion in Google Analytics Help.

You can also follow updates on the matter with a Google search, focused on the latest results.

The links are suspicious and a bit worrisome, because no one knows for sure if it’s a script attack, simple spam or a meaningless mistake on the Chinese side (unlikely). If you own a website, make sure your files haven’t been tampered with ( I’ve checked mine and they seem untouched) and that you have a strong FTP password and/or a strong admin password (if you have a CMS).

The best solution I have located thus far is to block the Chinese IPs through the .htaccess file. The IPs change with every hit, but you can also block whole batches of IP addresses from China if you don’t fear losing Chinese traffic.

If you wish to block traffic from cnzz.com and qq829.com, AurelloSoft suggests that you insert this code in your .htaccess file (COPY WITHOUT the dashes in the last line!):

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^qq829" TOBLOCK=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^cnzz" TOBLOCK=1

<FilesMatch "(.*)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=TOBLOCK
</FilesMatch>

—–

Update #1: There’s now a claim that qq829.com provides spammers with pre-written blogs. This re-enforces the assumption that the links are spam, but there hasn’t been any serious analysis of the site or the code.

Update #2: Thus far the best solution is blocking Chinese IP addresses via the .htaccess file. See instructions above.