{"id":1231,"date":"2011-05-11T23:19:25","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T06:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2011-05-11T23:19:25","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T06:19:25","slug":"wackiest-spam-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/11\/wackiest-spam-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Wackiest spam ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I got this random email reporting a broken link on my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.sfu.ca\/CC\/470\/ggbaker\/\">CMPT 470<\/a> web site. It&#8217;s a little unusual to get an email like that from someone who was apparently not a student, but not totally crazy.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<pre>From: angela.hill88@gmail.com\r\nSubject: Found a broken link on your page\r\n\r\nHey Greg,\r\n\r\nI found a broken link on\r\n<var>[web page on my course site]<\/var> and since I\r\nwas researching computer science and needed the page, I found an updated\r\narticle online. \r\n\r\nThe broken link to \"Howto for Python\" is\r\n<var>[the once-working link]<\/var> and I found an article on the front\r\npage of <var>[some not-totally-related web site]<\/var> if you wanted to fix it.\r\nClick the tab \"Beginner Python Tutorials\" to get to the article.\r\n\r\nFigure I'd send you an email because others may need that link for the same\r\nreasons!\r\n\r\nThanks!\r\n\r\nAngela Hill\r\nangela.hill88@gmail.com<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I googled the sender, and found this <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.python.org\/pipermail\/pydotorg-www\/2011-April\/001092.html\">essentially-identical broken link report<\/a> with the <em>same<\/em> &#8220;correct&#8221; URL.  There are a few other examples a Google away.  It&#8217;s freakin&#8217; link spam!<\/p>\n<p>If anybody really wants to find the target page (that I&#8217;m not going to link to prevent bumping their pagerank for any reason), it&#8217;s &#8220;onlinecomputersciencedegree&#8221; with a &#8220;www&#8221; and a &#8220;com&#8221;.  The site itself is entirely content-free: all external links to other pages.<\/p>\n<p>Somebody&#8217;s plan must be:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Crawl tech link pages.<\/li>\n<li>Link-checking all of their links. (The examples I have are <em>actually<\/em> broken links.)<\/li>\n<li>Finding the creator&#8217;s email and first name on the page. (or accessible somewhere else nearby?)<\/li>\n<li>Emailing that address with the spam link come-on.<\/li>\n<li>Hoping they blindly link to your site without noticing that it&#8217;s entirely worthless.<\/li>\n<li>Profit?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>How is this possibly a thing? Am I missing something?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I got this random email reporting a broken link on my CMPT 470 web site. It&#8217;s a little unusual to get an email like that from someone who was apparently not a student, but not totally crazy. From: angela.hill88@gmail.com Subject: Found a broken link on your page Hey Greg, I found a broken link [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}