Stock spam is back
I’ve written before about the increased use of URL shorteners in spam. For spammers, the advantage of using a URL shortening service is that the URLs in their messages aren’t immediately recognizable as spam domains, and recipients may be reluctant to reject messages just because they contain a shortened URL. On the other hand, if the shortening service admins are on the ball, they can set up tools to do mass purges of spammy URLs. But they must want to address the problem …
One problem is that many such services provide no obvious way to report abusive URLs. For instance, the popular service bit.ly, which is heavily abused by spammers, does not have a link on the site that can be used for reporting spam, and their ‘abuse’ address simply bounces email (bit.ly is ‘RFC-ignorant’). A similar problem applies to another heavily-abused service, su.pr, the shortening service for StumbleUpon. There’s nothing on the landing page for the site that offers any clue as to how the myriad of spammers currently abusing the service can be reported.
The latest victim of the spammers is goo.gl, the shortening service used by the Google Toolbar and other Google tools. If you go to the home page for the service, you’ll see a message saying that it is “currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use”
. Tell that to the spammers, who are already putting it to broad consumer use. And good luck trying to find a way to alert Google to the problem.
The nature of spammers is to take useful things and make them useless. If spammers are allowed to use any given shortening service unchecked, emails that contain URLs from that service will start getting filtered as spam. It’s therefore in the interests of the service provider to be vigilant. That means that they must not only act quickly and proactively to eliminate any bad URLs from their service, but they also should provide an easy way for users to report any abuse. So far, some of the biggest names are falling short in this area.
