Dries Buytaert

Spammers set up shop at IBM.com

In this post we show one way spammers operate, using organizations like IBM to spam others. We show how spammers abuse an IBM wiki to create an online pharmacy via IBM.com. Once a page like this is in place, the spammers try to insert links to it in blog comments and community websites across the web to drive traffic to it, and to improve their search engine ranking.

While IBM is not using Mollom (maybe they should?), many of the targeted blogs and community websites are, which is how we discovered this problem. Watch the video below for more details. This problem is not specific to IBM. We found hundreds of similar spam pages on Google Sites, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Wordpress.com, Ning, Tripod.com, Xanga.com and more.

I recorded this video last week, and notified IBM about the existence of these spam pages several days ago. We're happy to help IBM fix this problem.

— Dries Buytaert

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