Bizarro Trackback Spam
I can't tell whether I'm getting spammed or whether the Google bot has been hijacked, or is bing imitated. I've been getting trackbacks all day, on a limited number of posts, that all have something like "Good Information Good Information...", where the second one is a link to Yahoo. The puzzling thing is, by examining my logs, they are all coming from the Google bot - at IP address 66.249.72.104. Running traceroute verifies that the IP in question is from Google; so why the heck am I getting trackback spam that leaves a link to Yahoo from their bot? Very strange.
Comments
Mocking the 'bot
[mlq] April 6, 2006 17:26:15.085
Could be a more advanced spammer doing some IP spoofing. *shrug* Makes the bot look valid, adds spam, and, if you decide to do something about it, hurts Google. :-)
what about an API request
[Troy Brumley] April 6, 2006 17:51:48.661
What address does a google API request originate from? I haven't been keeping up with the API, so I don't know if it would support this sort of behavior or not, but it's the first idea that I have.
Are you GETting pings?
[Phil Ringnalda] April 6, 2006 19:34:10.902
My first thought would be "surely you don't accept Trackbacks from a GET request, do you?"
A couple of years back, when I noticed that Movable Type would actually accept a GET for either comments or Trackbacks (because the original spec called for GET rather than POST), my first two thoughts were "distributed spamming by posting a link on /." and "spam by creating a page of links that you want Googlebot to use to create your comments from an IP address that nobody will block (or, they'll be sorry when they do)."
google desktop
[duke] April 6, 2006 20:16:49.346
R u running google desktop, I have for a short time and it seemed to track everymove i made
I delete all gone
Re: Bizarro Trackback Spam
[ James Robertson] April 7, 2006 12:34:29.723
Comment by James Robertson
I just turned that off. I had added support for that years ago, back when I was still figuring out this space. It's been sitting there fallow, waiting to be exploited :/