This Abi Kabar is likely the most persistant spammer yet. I've already contracted his hosting service and they seem unconcerned, if not supported of him. I'm now contacted Google FeedBurner about his feeds. Hopefully, they'll take notice.

Here's his whois information for one of his dozens of domains.

http://whois.domaintools.com/rumahabi.com

I caught this dude from Santa Clara posting comment spam on one of the blogs. He owns hundreds of domains. Each domain and website is massive relinked to all the others. Quite a link farm.

Here's his address and contact info on one of his domain registrations.
http://whois.domaintools.com/abibakarblog.com

But he uses all sorts of names and addresses all over the world. On this blog, he goes by the name Abi Bakar.

Update: Guru Lakshman responded that he is simply the host, not the spammer.

Today, I received an automated message on the phone. I'm not saying a voice-mail. This is one of those services that calls you automatically and tell you about such and such a service or whatever. These services are completely out of control. I get several of these calls today. I hate them. I think it should be illegal to call someone with an automated message unless they specifically requested the service.

And the problem is getting worse. The service that called me today, called back in 15 minutes when I hung up immediately. In fact, it kept calling me every 15 minutes until I listened to the message.

Now the worst part. I listened to the message and its the mother of the best friend of my daughter telling us that her daughter can't attend her birthday party. The human personal touch. Wow! I guess she's too busy to call and have us answer the phone. Rather, she waste our precious time with this stupid service.

Today, I finally moved Destroy All Malware to its own domain; DestroyAllMalware.com.

http://www.destroyallmalware.com/

Quite often, the worst malware is the software that advertises itself as the cure to malware. In this case, PeoplePC spaminator. Why do people use these products? Every few days, I get an email from a service like PeoplePC saying that the person did not get my automated (and requested) email because the email address was not on their whitelist.

This guy operates numerous websites and he's been posting comment spam linking to them. His email is cebeci03@gmail.com. He lives in Turkey. His phone number is +90.5352289924. If you know this guy, then you now know he's scum. Tell his family and friends.

This guy has been comment spamming one of my websites to death today. Let's make sure all his family and friends know he's a big spammer. I've also reported him to Google and every other spam authority, so that they are aware how much of a spammer this guy is.

In the last 24 hours, I noticed I had a new virus on my computer. This virus was pre-installed on my Dell Vista machine. It's called PC Tools Spyware Doctor. It hadn't caused me any problems previously, but in the last day it turns my dual-core Pentium into a 386. I tried stopping the scan. Didn't work. I tried shutting it down. Didn't work. Finally, I resorted to restarting my computer, then immediately uninstalled it. Wow, my computer is fast again. What a virus!

Honestly, the only spyware this tool ever reported was cookies. What a piece of crap.

Got Windows? Get protection from the April 1st virus called Conficker. Goto Microsoft OneCare if you don't already have virus protection. Update your virus protection and run a full scan.

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm

This last day, I intiated a first step in a anti-splogging program that seeks out splogs. You can find them by searching for the keywords "Have you been splogging?" at pretty much any blog search engine. Basically, I search for splogs that are compromised (most splogs are) and post on their blog using the hole. The splogs are then linked to the previous blog entry; Splogger Note. The next step would be to unsubscribe them from the service they are using to splog.

If you found a blog entry that linked here, then it's very likely that we discovered you were using a common splogging technique. This technique has a major flaw in that we can now post whatever we want on your blog. If you weren't intending to splog, then please accept our apologies, but note that your blog is compromised since the email address used to post directly to your blog was made public.

Don't know what Splogging is? Read the following.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog
• http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/11/08/behind-splogging-why-sploggers-splog/

I just purchased DestroyAllMalware.com. I'll be transferring this blog there in the near future.

One major problem that I had to deal with when I created Rmail, was email-to-blog gateways like Blogger's that allowed users to publish on their blogs via email. Rmail converted RSS feeds to emails. This made it trivial for sploggers to steal content by combining Rmail with the email-to-blog gateway. Rmail converts content to emails and the gateway republishes them (stolen) onto another blog. What I did was create a very simply mechanism that would automatically unsubscribe the user when the content was republished.  The technique wasn't prefect, as it did allow the splogger to steal content for weeks and sometimes months before the splogger was discovered and unsubscribed. Unfortunately, most all other RSS-to-email gateway didn't have such a feature, so the blogosphere is currently littered with splogs, mostly on blogspot.com. I've decided to expand my technique to work with other RSS-to-email gateways. It shouldn't take long to write. I'll report back later.

Today, I found that Google has removed this blog from their UK search results. This happened on June 25th. They sent me a message via their Webmaster's tools. It was done, because I wrote a blog entry more than a year ago. The blog entry was about a scammer who was sueing Google in order to de-index people who are exposing his scam. Seems he was successful.

As I mentioned previously, the root problem is the government of the UK, who have been unable to keep up in the Internet age. If you read this and live in the UK, then you might want to tell your politicians to get off their lazy asses and do something productive. And don't worry, we in Canada have similar problems.

http://kbcafe.com/spam/?guid=20070630062328

The last two days, I've run into an unordinate amount of Facebook captchas. Worse, I miss more than half. It seems their captcha system is b0rked.

This is a paid review.

AllSpammedUp is a new anti spam blog dedicated mostly to business anti spam topics and email security (phishing). Their tagline is anti-spam in a business environment. Recent blog entries include MySpace legal fights against spammers, revelations of how viagra spammers make their dimes and Spamhaus legal battles with spammer too dumb to keep their mouths shut. This blog is definitely worth your time, especially if you're a corporate IT manager. Promoting those that fight against spam and other malware is something this blog has always been about. Let's get the word out on these guys. Link to an article or two on your own blog. Subscribe to their RSS feed. You can get their blog entries via email with SendMeRSS and directly from them by submitting the Subcribe by Email form on their blog pages. This blog start in April of this year and is mostly authored by Sue Walsh with an occasional article contributed by other authors. They have a few dozen articles to date, all of which are a few paragraphs (3-10) in length. Hopefully we'll see a lot more in the future from these guys. I'm subscribed and I'll be linking to them in the future.

http://www.allspammedup.com/

I thought I'd follow up on the RightFielders scam I uncovered. BlogAds sent me an email, indicating they had previously received complaints about RightPundits and were already investigating the issue. They asked them to change the wording on their order page to remove any confusion. RightPundits made the change. Then I got an email from Mary McCain. They demanded my posts be taken down and that my allegations were false. And if I didn't, they would report me to BlogAds.

http://www.destroyallmalware.com/?guid=20080506235631

Today, I discovered an ad scam on the BlogAds network. I first came upon the fraudulent network a few weeks ago when I started to get a ton of referrers from them. When I checked into the referrers, it turned out it was referrer spam (not legit). I sent them an email to stop it, they turned off the switch and I stopped receiving a ton of (fake) referrers from them. Then I got an email from a reader informing me of potential impression fraud. I didn't really think twice of it as I get more emails than I can bother consuming. But the same day, I was checking out my blogs on the BlogAds network and discovered they were were making some good coin from their advertisers. It appears they are making more than $1000 per week on BlogAds. They are employing an array of tactics to defraud their advertisers. First, it appears they are using a botnet (or the likes of) to inflate hits, but I can't prove that.  Second, they are placing premium ads in the bottom of sidebars of other irrelevant blogs on their network. This artificially inflates their numbers with impressions their advertisers would surely gag on, if they only knew. Their primary blog is called RightPundits, but they also have other blogs; RightFielders and RightCelebrity. If you advertise in one of their premium BlogAds units, then your ad will also appear on the other blogs, but further down the sidebar. In fact, it may appear more often down the sidebar of other blogs, then where the advertiser actually intended to place it. They do have text in some (not all) places that indicate that ads may be placed elsewhere, but the text is confusing at best.

They are also using AdSense, but only the link units. This is likely because Google would've quickly booted them if they were using a unit that might generate revenues for fake impression. They don't seem to be breaking any AdSense terms or policies. They are also using AdBrite, but less preeminently.

• http://www.rightpundits.com/
• http://sports.rightpundits.com/
• http://celebrity.rightpundits.com/

Over the years, I've had lots of comment spammers, but none have consistantly spammed me like BigCrumb. No link to them for obvious reasons. If you look at their website, they say no spam. If you look in their fact, they say no spam. Yet, day-in, day-out, I get nothing but comment spam from them. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard of them outside of them spamming me and people bitching that they are mega-spammers.

Today, I was playing around with various APIs for my reblinks website and I noticed that the SplogSpot API was always returning NOT a splog, even for splogs in their database. I tried to submit a bug report, but their captcha is too hard for humans (check it out). Then I noticed that their recently found splog and full splog database files were AWOL. I guess that project died.

http://splogspot.com/

Today, my website got comment spammed by David Lechner. This is the contact information in Tucows database. So, if you know this guy, then you know now that he's also a spammer.

    lechner, david  davidtl999@yahoo.com
    1837 beverly circle
    clearwater, FL 33764
    US
    +1.7274413467

Sorry, this blog has fallen into neglect, as I've got too many projects going.

Paul McDougall: Under the plan offered by the Software & Information Industry Association, anyone who unwittingly buys fake software from an online fraudster can receive up to $500 if they report the scam.

http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205100007