Tigerspice Revisited
This will be my last post regarding tigerspice or any other form of spam on my blog for a while - simply because it’s a tiring subject.
I haven’t received any other spam comments/trackbacks from tigerspice.com or anything connected to them, but I thought this is some good need to know information for anyone who is still receiving this crap.
tigerspice.com is back online - in fact, it was never really offline like I had surmised. For about a week, his domain redirected to another gambling site (most likely has nothing to do with the spammer).
Because I noted a few other people were still receiving comment/trackback spam from them and, to me, continuing to send spam for a domain that doesn’t work is kinda stupid, so I decided to check into it.
The website is back up, however, the nameservers are still listed as ns1(and ns2).suspended-for-spam.com. And if you visit the nameserver, you’ll get a little email form stating “this site has been shut down for spam, if this is your site, email support” yada yada.
What’s the trick? If you do a whois query on suspended-for-spam.com, you’ll find that it’s registered to the same moron who does the comment/trackback spam. At least if you’re going to fake whois info, diversify…and what a big surprise, the domain was registered on Feb 15, 2005.
This new domain is under the IP address 219.153.9.11, an IP block owned by China Telecom. This is probably a proxy of some sort. If you’re feeling ambitious, and are still getting spam, consider dropping a quick email to: anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net with a detailed explanation of what’s happening.
Info to note: The site is currently not listed in the Google, MSN, or Yahoo! index (Yahoo! has a record of the actual domain name, but it’s not ranking the site URL for anything other than it’s exact domain name complete with .com at the end).
And if you want to see something scary - here’s the reason why spammers continue to spam. In case you missed it - that’s roughly 33,200 blogs which are crawling with tigerspice spam that hasn’t been deleted…if you’re going to abandon your blog, turn off the comments and trackbacks.
When I’m more awake, I may do some further research/looking into it. But for now, I’m off to bed (and yes, I’m fully aware that it’s 5am).
March 1st, 2005 at 7:36 am
I, for one, am interested in the results of any research you decide to do
March 1st, 2005 at 10:19 am
I’d wager that there’s more than 33,200 out there.
March 1st, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Me too. Gawd what I wouldn’t do to spam if I cornered it in a dark alley. So far WP 1.5 seems to be keeping most of mine out and I haven’t had any trackback spam since closing trackbacks. It still chaps my hide though, how they invade our own space. Uggh.
March 1st, 2005 at 6:04 pm
@Tom: I’ll definitely keep everyone posted
@Jason: I’d wager you’re right…
@Daisyhead: Amen! It chaps my hide too.
March 14th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Have you all found that 1.5 stops most of the spam?
March 14th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
I have personally. Only one trackback spam has made it through on my soho blog (from a domain other than tigerspce) since I’ve upgraded, none have made it through on this blog.
I’m really loving 1.5…
March 14th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Thanks, Teli. I’ve just moved my blog to a new server; now I’ll make some time to test 1.5 before upgrading. But I’m more than a little tired of those uber-boring blog spammers (it gets worse if you look at your server logs).
March 14th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Oh gosh…server logs…it’s insane what these people do for attention. It still makes not a lick of sense to me though…now I’m getting referral spam from an IP address, not even a domain name and my .htaccess file is starting to get huge.
March 14th, 2005 at 11:01 pm
Links help a great deal in driving a web page up in the search engines. It’s not the *all* of optimizing websites for search engine rankings (in fact, it’s only the getting-the-links part). It appears that the pills/gambling/adult areas are not only terribly competive but apparently they look for automated ways of getting links, so they spam blogs (in the hopes that their links get posted) and “visit” websites (in the hopes that the links in their little spider-thingy get posted to the sites’ stats programs *and* that the stats are not password-protected). Unwanted guests. Terminally boring.
March 15th, 2005 at 12:20 am
You are right Diane, I know why they do it, it just doesn’t make sense to me…stupid 1% rule…
March 15th, 2005 at 12:23 am
Yes, but they’re apparently sending out automated programs to a gazillion sites, so I guess 1% is good for them. One wishes they’d just stop pestering other people.
March 15th, 2005 at 12:26 am
And something else - shame on those people who make those automated programs and distribute them to these pests