darkoshi | Entries tagged with spam

An old post of mine got three linkspam comments today. The comments were posted by a Ukranian IP #, and include the URL of "Custom Software Development Company RexSoft".

Per Norton SafeWeb and Google, the site doesn't have unsafe content.

Per the Wayback Machine, the site has existed since at least 2017.

Per the web site itself, the company has locations in the USA, the UK, and Kyiv, Ukraine.

It seems the entity that left the comments was unclear how to make their URL get posted as an HREF link on my journal, as the 2nd and 3rd comments, posted several minutes after the first, had only the URL. So I'd guess it was a person posting the comments, not a bot.

It seems an odd time, during a war, for someone in Ukraine to post linkspam. That's why I checked if the site might have malicious content.

It also occurred to me that maybe Russia, not that Rexsoft company, could be behind the linkspam. As this page says, "not only are Google getting better at devaluing spammy links, the repercussions from Google can be devastating if caught."

Linkspam like that could hurt the company rather then help it; maybe Russia wants that. It seems an implausible action, but who knows. I will delete or screen the comments eventually.

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Random thought from yesterday, regarding how some of the Russian soldiers were told Ukrainians would welcome them, and were surprised by the resistance:
Maybe Russian (and other national) intelligence agencies have a hard time gauging the sentiment of people due to all of their own (and other) disinformation campaigns that they've been waging. Maybe they can't easily tell which and how many social media posts are by their own disinformation agents versus the actual population.

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Another random thought from yesterday:
Take your kid to work day must be very boring for kids whose parents work from home.

Out of curiosity, I looked into that Rexsoft linkspam some more.

There have been several recent and similar linkspam posts and comments on other sites. These were all posted with a user name of "ann2022":
forums.tarot.com
kboards.com
vivecraft.org
ragezone
cracked.io

Four of those same pages also have linkspam for another site, develux.com. That is a company with locations listed in Kyiv, Ukraine; Malta; and Kissimmee, Florida.

Here's another page with posts from last year that link to both sites:
caclubindia

So it seems there may be a relationship between those 2 companies, or in the people posting the spam for them.

The Kissimmee, Florida address is referenced on other pages as "Devellux Inc".
The same address and Devellux name is used on this site: essayservice.com.
Amusingly, they have a page that discusses their "Honor Code". Given all the things that (as I would expect) go against their listed honor code, I wonder if there are any situations for which someone could honorably use an essay writing service for?

Rexsoftinc's NYC address (347 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1009) is referenced on other pages as N-IX USA INC, and Hoshovsky Law Firm ("Mr. Hoshovsky has practiced law in Ukraine...".

This xing.com page says that "Alexander Volt" is a vice president of rexsoft.
This Alexander Volt fellow is also listed as working at IntellectSoft. IntellectSoft is a company with locations listed as in the US, the UK, Norway, and (you guessed it) Kyiv, Ukraine.

Even if these spam calls are intended for nothing other than to find out when I'm likely to answer the phone, what is the point of them, if when I pick up, there is no response and no message, only dead silence followed by beep beep beep, disconnect?

All that does is to further condition me to never ever EVER answer the phone if it's not a number I recognize.

Or are they really dialing random numbers trying to find fax machines, because sending fax spam is still somehow a lucrative activity for someone?

This page has a great "prove you're human / not a spammer" test thingy at the bottom, although I fear it may be too difficult or confusing for some people, especially if they're from someplace without much public transportation. But maybe that's on purpose, as they only want locals to post comments.

https://ggwash.org/view/65334/topic-of-the-week-what-does-trick-or-treating-look-like-in-your-building-or-neighborhood

The question, and sometimes the map, changes each time you reload the page.
Even I'm not certain about some things (one question mentioned the "full time" yellow line; not sure what that means, or how one can see that on the map).

My recent "robot discrimination" cross-post on LiveJournal just got an anonymous spam comment. It is in the exact same style as all the past spam comments I had been getting before I enabled the option to "Show CAPTCHA to anonymous commenters" back in mid-October. I haven't gotten a single spam comment since then until now.

I just checked, and the CAPTCHA is still enabled and working (oddly, the CAPTCHA text shown is the normal English/Latin alphabet, but the instruction text within the text box is Russian).

So what this means is that there are people who post spam like that manually, or this spam bot is able to pass the simple LJ text CAPTCHA (which wouldn't be surprising as that is why many sites have changed to other image-based CAPTCHAs). In other words, Amazon's robot test, which is also simple text-based), would fail against this bot.

Isn't it a funny coincidence that the spam comment was posted, on this particular post? It almost makes me want to unscreen the comment rather than deleting it.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/680831.html

This was a new one for me.
Pick up the phone, hear what sounds like a live voice saying "Hello?"... I reply Hello, and the lady's voice says "I'm sorry, I was having trouble with my headset", which really makes it sound like a live person. Then she starts off reading some marketing spiel. During which I try to interrupt to say I'm not interested and would she please put me on their no-call list, but the voice just keeps on going without pausing, as if it must be a recording after all.
I hung up.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/676798.html

This is the LJ link for editing entries:
http://www.livejournal.com/editjournal.bml

I need to use that page occasionally, as edit links no longer show up for me by my LJ entries on the regular pages. It's probably due to my journal style being old or no longer supported, but it doesn't bother me enough to make me want to change the style because of it. Dreamwidth, where I post and edit most of my entries, doesn't have the problem. But due to spambots posting a lot of spam on some of the older entries on LiveJournal, I've been having to edit them to lock or disable the comments.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/663070.html

The killdeer chicks must have hatched. I saw & heard the 2 adult birds along with at least 3 small ones cheeping about in the shade of a tree.

Worked late today. Left the office a bit before 11pm. The ..critters.. in the trees making their noises - I don't even know what they are (note to self: look up the critter sounds; do cicadas make 2 different kinds of sounds?), but the sound is so relaxing and peaceful for me. And the quality of the night - the temperature, amount of humidity, scents as well as sounds - reminded me of similar nights experienced when I was a child.

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Outside the gate on my driveway, something odd. Reddish brown spots, like something bled along there. They don't look like rust spots, as they aren't directly under the gate. Maybe a dog was wandering around bleeding. Or maybe a dog caught some prey and carried it, bleeding, in its mouth.

Then I remembered something odd from yesterday. Driving home, I had passed a guy jogging along the side of the street. It's rare to see a jogger in that area. He had orange shorts on. The odd part was a black scarf over his mouth. It had white circles on it which somehow reminded me of those ghost/ghoul masks. It's summer and was probably at least 85 degrees outside. Why would someone jog with a scarf over their mouth in summer? It's not a dusty area. I wondered if it was some kind of gang initiation.

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For the past month, my LJ has been getting spam comments on old posts, all of the same style but with different wording and URLs, and from different IP numbers. At least one every other day. All comments on my LJ are screened by default, so it's not doing anyone any good.

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Last Friday, the day I found out about my sister moving... when I went outside for lunch and a walk, I got caught in a rainstorm and got soaked. The forecast had foretold a clear sunny day, so although it started to get stormy and sprinkle, I didn't pay it much attention, other than bringing my umbrella along. My mind was on other things. Then suddenly it was pouring down, really pouring down, and even standing under a tree with my umbrella didn't help much. After it finally let up, I walked to our nearby Fitness Center to dry myself off with paper towels. It sounded like I was the only person in the building. Besides the paper towels, there was a blow-dryer that I used to dry my shirt. That was an experience. But my pants and shoes were still quite wet, and I didn't want to wear wet socks and shoes the rest of the day. So I drove home and worked the rest of day from there.

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/657678.html

I got an LJ Notice that "grevvlad" added me as a friend. So I looked at their profile. It doesn't show me on their friends list, so I suppose they added me and then removed me. I couldn't figure out if it was a real account/person, or something spammy/nefarious.

Their LJ seems to only have videos posted. If you click on some of their interests... say "moontale"... it shows several communities where this person is the only, or nearly the only poster. And the things posted on those communities are again mostly videos - music videos. Dark/industrial/metal type music. As well as videos of an anti-German(?) slant.

Certainly suspicious. But if it is something spammy, it is more complex than usual. And what is the purpose?

Ah! As I was browsing a few of those LJ pages, I got a popup that my MalwareBytes blocked something... so the purpose must be to install malware on people's computers, or something nefarious indeed.

Yay! for MalwareBytes Anti-Malware PRO. I installed it with the real-time protection module this weekend, after buying a license (4 licenses actually... one for my friend's computer, one for my mom's, one for Qiao, and one for me).

Today's log:
08:31:29 *** MESSAGE Protection started successfully
08:31:34 *** MESSAGE IP Protection started successfully
21:26:59 *** IP-BLOCK 82.146.59.111 (Type: outgoing, Port: 49523, Process: firefox.exe)
21:50:49 *** IP-BLOCK 82.146.59.111 (Type: outgoing, Port: 49799, Process: firefox.exe)

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/430046.html

As I mentioned in the past, I'm getting a lot of spam comments on LiveJournal lately. Some of them don't include any links, and don't advertise anything. I haven't figured out the purpose of these. It may be to make the user seem less suspicious, for administrators checking on the user's activity, after they've been reported for spamming. For example, one user has posted various comments on different journals, including:

"Great, I never knew this, thanks." (on my entry)
"Beneficial info and excellent design you got here! I want to thank you for sharing your ideas"
"Great view I recently hit on your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my..."
"Great work keep it coming, best blog on earth. "
"Hi there, awesome site. I thought the topics you posted on were very interesting ..."
"Keep posting stuff like this i really like it."

and then the odd comment out (but still not including any link)(and oddly, posted in English on a Russian journal),
"The aims of acne treatment are to prevent new spots forming, to improve on acne treatment already ..."

Crossposts: http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/401294.html

My recent entry got an anonymous comment with subject "claim insurance" and with the text "Good entry. I appreciate you for posting it. Keep up the fine blogging." Usually when I get a spam comment, the email notification shows hidden links which don't show up in the actual comment. But this one doesn't, which made me uncertain at first if it really was spam or not. That comment text would be a nice way of phrasing that you liked someone's posts. But based on the subject, it most certainly was spam, and whatever link they were trying to post in the subject line must have gotten stripped out before the notification was sent.

Interestingly, Google has 4450 hits for that exact comment text. Most of them seem to be spam as well, with various subject lines, some linking to other sites.

I've been getting more spam comments lately than in the past... 1 or 2 a week.

Well, this is interesting. Q's LJ account just got friended by this id. The profile on that account doesn't seem suspicious. But it only has friends-locked entries.

I did a Google-search, and found an older cached version of that account's profile. The cached version has a different user pic, is in Russian, and has a completely different set of entries in the friends-list - several of which are Russian-sounding.

It seems that the spammers/bot-creators are getting smarter and realizing that the Russian parts are tip-offs. And it seems that they must be friending a certain number of journals, waiting a while to see who will friend them back, and then unfriending the previous ones in order to friend another set of journals. That avoids them seeming suspicious by having too many entries in their friends-list.

I wonder where they are getting the text to use on their profiles; if they are randomly copying it from other journals...? Ah, it must be so. I did a search on the profile text, and found this account, which appears to be a real one: http://vazor222.livejournal.com/profile.

Off to report the suspicious ID...

Another possibility is that it was a real account that got hijacked by a spammer.

Chinese craze for English tattoos - the mystique of having foreign characters on one's skin isn't only popular on this side of the world.

I keep debating whether to delete my Classmates.com account. They are one of the most annoying sites I have come across, in terms of spam. First, unless you change the default options, every time you view someone else's profile, they notify that person that someone has "signed" their guestbook (and likewise when someone visits your profile). Plus they send all these other emails. I figured out how to unsubscribe from them all several months ago. Recently I looked at a page on the website again, and apparently just doing that has caused me to automatically get re-subscribed to all those darn emails again. Clicking the links in the emails to unsubscribe doesn't seem to actually unsubscribe you; either that, or they must have bunches of different types of emails, and you'd need to click the links in each one.

Ah, it is a bot. Another person was friended by a different ID with the same friends-locked posts... they copied all the posts and pasted them into an entry in their own journal:
http://12daysofrain.livejournal.com/129369.html
I haven't taken the time to read the story, myself, since it is just from a spam bot.

One of these days, Forestfen is finally going to "get it" about how any unsolicited email trying to get her to sign up for something, or order something, or even offering her free things, are all spam or scams, and how she should just ignore and delete them instead of taking them seriously. And one day, she will also start remembering that when she gets forwarded emails, that she should at least check them out on Snopes.com, before believing them.

One day.

And then all my coaching her on it will have been worthwhile.

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I wish organizations did not send letters on perfumed paper. And I wish stores did not use scented plastic bags. My allergies are bad enough. And even ignoring the allergies, the scented plastic bags smell nasty.

At least in this one, girls aren't laughing at me.

Your woman doesn't admire to have sex with you because of your male aggregate size.

Don't panic you can solve this trouble now.

All you have to do is just use our device enlargement.

Your sexual life will change surely enough.

The emails I get...

You Do not like your male organ size.

Girls laugh at you.

You have astonishing possibility to solve this trouble.

Use our device en,largement and Girls will love you surely enough.

Current Mood: amused

Ok, now, I've had my local phone service active for 5 and a half days, and I'm already getting phone-spam!

Current Mood: boggled

Spam that contains my name in the subject line is even more annoying than other spam. Not because I am at all fooled by it, but because... how DARE they put my name in their friggin spam! As IF they know me at all, as IF they have the right to address me by name, as IF they are that intimate with me.

I wonder which place I ordered from sold them my email address. Or which place let my email address get stolen. I have a hunch. Or do some spammers intercept emails with sniffers, and read personal info such as names out of them?