Thursday, September 28, 2006

Virginia Tech's Computer Science: Wiki Spam 101

My website stops spam posts cold, and logs them, so that eventually I can glance over the list of bounced spams now and then just to see what was caught and this one was priceless:

09/28/2006
200.88.223.98
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
Subject: "Viagra"
URL: http://research.cs.vt.edu/advance/tiki/
tiki-directory_redirect.php?siteId=3284#viagra

I looked and thought, "Viagra spam linking to VT.EDU? Could their server be hacked like SpamHuntress is posting about?" So I click the link and of course it uses VT.EDU's server to redirect me to some viagra sales site just like the URL would make you think it would, no surpise there.

So I trimmed the URL to see what in the heck this site was and it's ADVANCE, FOR THE ADANCEMENT OF WOMEN IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING CAREERS and it's full of advances for MEN such as viagra, cialis and levitra spam plus a whole bunch more.

Well, the IT dept. and professors in charge of the VT computer science program should probably start quaking in their boots as I would be VERY UNHAPPY if I was the Dean.

This is completely unacceptable when the IT guys and CS Profs aren't using even rudimentary anti-spam technology like, oh, maybe a simple CAPTCHA to stop this shit.

I want my tuition refunded.

BTW, whoever these spammers are, they've been VERY BUSY little beavers.

2 comments:

Aaron said...

I rarely see schools keep their servers under control.

Unknown said...

any time you see a "tiki" wiki, it's pretty much guaranteed to be FILLED with spam link pages that the spammers will try to link to from real wikis elsewhere.

spammers LOVE those things.

VT (among other colleges) is STILL absolutely full of those things, and you wouldn't believe the sort of nose-in-the-air we're-not-hurting-anybody response you get if you try to politely contact the people responsible for the tiki and let them know that spammers are using them as a jump-off point.