Keyword forumspam

2007-05-13 spam forumspam

Now that I've been collecting spam from actual fora for a little while, I have some initial statistics and musings.

I've collected spam from one eBoard 4.0 forum since May 5; it is now May 13. The spam filters I'm using are blocking about 93% of the postings, making the moderation burden manageable for that forum. In those 8 days I have collected 1,235 spam samples. That's 150 spams a day, from a fairly obscure forum; in retrospect, even though the actual log activity seems low, this is a lot of spam.

Those 1,235 spam samples link to a total of 10,795 links. I haven't yet built analysis machinery to get much farther than that; I've mostly been just looking at the links, retrieving the pages, and musing about how all that might be automated in an interesting and useful way.

Some tidbits:

Some of the spam links point to actual sites being advertised. I don't yet have a feel for many links point to sites other than those actually advertised, but there are some interesting commonalities. For instance, there are a lot of pages placed onto vulnerable fora and other venues which simply link to other pages. In some cases, it's easy to tell why: Google spamming and simply a way to counter attempts to block posts which link to particular URLs.

I have a separate notion to find and track those vulnerable sites, and to attempt to mine them for further information on these spam networks.

Bugzilla, oddly enough, seems to have such a vulnerability. (Can you call this a vulnerability?) There are links to pages stored as attachments to bug reports. Those attachments are (naturally enough) not subject to any content restrictions. Unfortunately, that means you can put any Javascript into them at all.

I haven't yet found actual malicious Javascript being spammed to fora. What I have found is obscured Javascript which modifies document.location to force a page forward to another site. I consider that semimalicious, and my initial goal is to find a way to detect that with some sort of automatic analysis, and block posts based solely on the basis of link to that sort of page.

I figure it's only a matter of time, though, before I find some actual malicious Javascript which will attempt to rootkit my machine with keyboard loggers to steal my bank accounts. That's pretty cool, actually, so I'm watching the spam traps with bated breath.

One spam has a huge number of links to different domains, all of which resolve to the same IP. That's an interesting feature. I'm not sure how to track it yet. What I really want to do is some kind of generic analysis framework, but I don't have a good picture of what that framework would look like, or indeed precisely what it is that I expect it to do.

It seems that what I want to do is to build a kind of task list for an incoming event. That task list would consist of a certain (small) number of analysis steps which themselves generate new analysis events. Each step is a test. The results of the tests are cached, so that all possible duplicated effort is avoided, but also so that relationships such as "these spam efforts share an IP" can be found.

There's a certain exponential explosion involved, it seems at times. But there are also patterns which could cut down on the amount of work done. Of those 10,795 links I have so far (oops, in the time it's taken to write this much, two more spams have arrived, so I now have 10,886 links to analyze) -- of those 10,886 links I have, many of them are hosted at .007ihost.com -- 2,804 of them, as a matter of fact. It will be very interesting to analyze the spam pattern there, by the way. Are all of these from the same spammer? Same IP? (Bet not.) But more germane to the point I was making, eliminating those URLs from separate analysis will cut out 20% of the analysis effort.

Well, anyway, this is just a little talking out loud while I muse about how to automate all this analysis. Eventually I'll get down to posting graphs of some sort. That will be fun. The other thing, of course, is some way to ask about a URL, "Is this URL a spam indicator?" I hope it will also cross-fertilize with Despammed.com. Wish me luck.







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