Researchers at Microsoft Thursday released a new report and tool aimed at preventing Web spammers from exploiting Internet search engines to drive
traffic to spam URLs.
The tool, called the Strider Search Defender, identifies spam URLs that are being distributed through social networking, forum
and blog-hosting Web sites, and can prevent those URLs from being indexed by search engines, said Yi-Min Wang, group manager
of the Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group in Microsoft Research.
Instead of commenting on user pages of popular forums and blog sites -- such as Google BlogSpot or MySpace -- spammers will
send URLs that link to spam Web sites to as many Internet forum pages as they can, he said. Since these URLs appear so frequently
on valid Web sites, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's own MSN will index them and they will begin appearing
in search results, Wang said.
"They create a URL they want people to click and they put that into every possible open forum and guest book they can," he
said. "Some search engines will see that this URL is everywhere on the Web so [they think] it should be popular. But it doesn't
have the kind of relevance to be in the top search-engine results."
The tool uses elements of technology previously developed in Microsoft Research in projects called Strider, HoneyMonkey and
Typo Patrol to search forums that have been spammed and to identify spam URLs in the hope of removing them before they are
indexed by search engines. It also has an element that can distinguish between legitimate URLs on Web forums and spam URLs,
Wang said.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
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