Now that automatic comment spam is becoming less effective, thanks to tools like Akismet, the miscreant marketters are addding a new few tricks to their their arsenal.

According to Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection, spammers are paying people to write long and intelligent comments on your posts. These comments look like any other comment, except perhaps a little longer, but the author link points to a spam site.

Since automattic spamming of blogs has mostly been reduced to a trickle due to the likes of Akismet, spammers are now individually targeting blog posts with highly relevant, and in many cases highly convincing comments. I moderated and subsequently spammed a comment today that was over a hundred words long, on the pros and cons of one of the themes on our daily theme posts. I thought the comment was a very well written review of theme until I looked closely. The URI of the poster was a refinancing Made For AdSense page.

In other words: It’s getting far to hard to tell the difference between a legit comment and a spam comment. (more…)

Back in December, I wrote an article about recovering after your blog has been vandalized. Of course, you want to avoid having your blog trashed in the first place.

The Lost Art of Blogging has recently released an informative article on securing your WordPress-powered blog. “Fighting Blog Hacks: Preventing And Eliminating Intruders” covers several things you should do to help avoid having your blog vandalized. They’re mainly simple tweaks, and you should definitely consider implementing them.

A few weeks ago I had the unpleasant surprise of finding out that my blog [The Lost Art of Blogging] got automatically hacked by spam bots, due to a Wordpress exploit, and in course also got infected with malware. Google, vigilant as always, was quick on scanning LOAB for any malicious software, found some corrupted code and immediately flagged the blog. What happened next was very predictable: who ever tried to search to for something on Google and found LOAB among the search results wasn’t able to access the blog, as it was “quarantined.” I lost hundreds of visitors daily during the course of two weeks, my rankings were shattered and of course the blog’s reputation was stained; as a side note I’d like to thank all the loyal readers that confidently continued to read my blog during that tough period.

Don’t let it happen to your blog.