The new era of spam? Technical-related comments that defeat anti-spam filters

Part of the tasks of every blogger is to update the anti-spam filters (a WordPress plugin in my case, akismet), read the comments in quarantine and either approve them, delete them or mark them as spam (to that the anti-spam plugin can enrich the spam detection algorithms).

So far, the main factor to me to decide to approve or not, is to read the content of the message and find it appropriate or not for the blog post.

Until today.

Some time ago I have written this blog post about diagnosing problems in deleting the Audit Trail in Oracle 12c:

DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.CLEAN_AUDIT_TRAIL not working on 12c? Here’s why…

Last week I have got this comment:

Technical. Talking about Oracle Audit (which is relevant to my blog post) and with  technical details that only an Oracle professional might know.

So I have approved it and read my blog post again to find a proper answer.

Except that my blog post was not talking about Unified Audit, relink of binaries or exports!

I have realized then that the “link” of the blogger was in fact a website selling sex toys… (yeah, writing this here will bring even more spam… I take the risk 🙂 )

So where does it come from? Actually, the comment has been copied from another blog:

https://petesdbablog.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/12c-new-feature-unified-auditing/

A new type of spam (maybe it exists since a while? I am not a spam expert).

The spammer (bot?) copies technical comments from blog posts with similar keywords and just changes the name and the link of the author.

Beware, bloggers.

Ludo

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Ludovico

Principal Product Manager at Oracle
Ludovico is a member of the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability & Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Product Management team in Oracle. He focuses on Oracle Data Guard, Flashback technologies, and Cloud MAA.

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