Don Marti

Wed 25 Nov 2009 09:49:15 AM PST

Redirect scripts again

A US three-letter agency, a well-known 100/101-member DC-based legislative body, one of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, one of the ten largest household cleaning products companies in the world, one of the 20 largest semiconductor vendors in the world, the peer-reviewed journal of a national scientific organization.

All being used for comment spam, because they're all running an open HTTP redirect script. More here: Goodbye scripts.

As comment spam filtering gets more sophisticated, the comment spammers are using more tricks to "launder" their URLs through legit sites. And cheese-tastic 1990s redirect scripts seem to be the latest.

Is everybody just using JavaScript-based stats, and not looking at their raw logs any more? So the spammers bouncing traffic off your site don't even show up to you?