Blog homeAs long time readers will know - anyone who messes with my blog is asking for trouble! My version of trouble is normally a good old public exposure (via this blog of course!).
In the past we have had Boo.com gaming Digg - which was an interesting - and high traffic - event caused by Boo.com trying ever so hard to make their website appeal to the Digg generation. It probably worked as well - who knows.
We also had Cheapflights.com editing Wikipedia - not quite as exciting as the CIA editing Wikipedia (BBC) - but I did have the story at least 3 months earlier than the BBC…..
So far I had dodged any legal bullets coming in my direction. Perhaps that means I was right. I hope so.
Anyway, onto today. Rather than a large, well known, website - today its a lowly splog. A splog, as defined by Wikipedia, is:
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to as splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author users to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase pagerank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
So “disreputable” and “useless” - probably not something I want associated with my website.
What was it that alerted me to a splog on my blog?
It was a comment published by “Tom” from a website called WorldVacation.org. (No - I am not going to link to it!). The comment read “Wow, I am impressed with this site…“. Most people know that computer hacking is mainly about social engineering (i.e. getting another human to tell you a password or whatever) - likewise this comment on my blog appealed to my ego - so I manually moderated it - and let it be published. I didn’t look at their website very closely as I don’t really have time to do that kind of thing.
However, this morning, I saw a similar comment on the Travolution blog - the comment on their blog read “I don’t always agree with you, but I see that you are objective in your postings. Despite the differences I still enjoy reading your posts and I often learn even when our viewpoints are different. 
“. This was on a post that didn’t have anything you could agree or disagree with - so alerted me that something wasn’t quite right. I also remembered the same website being linked to from my blog.
So - posting a fake comment on my blog - appeal to my ego to ensure it stays published. Post a fake comment on Travolution - appeal to their journalistic objectivity. Umm…. I see where we are going with this. Someone out there is very clever - its social engineering at its best.
What can I do in response?
The domain name is registered by DomainsByProxy.com - a service that lets you register domain names without disclosing to the public who owns the domain. (A normal WHOIS on a domain will tell you the company owner etc - but with this service that is hidden - unless you are a government or something similar)
As a result, there isn’t much I can do except write a blog post like this one!
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