Spam Blog - History

History

The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was used publicly by Mark Cuban, but appears to have been used a few times before for describing spam blogs going back to at least 2003. It developed from multiple linkblogs that were trying to influence search indexes and others trying to Google bomb every word in the dictionary.

The term may be applied to more recent infections, most noticeably those reported by Webtrends in April 2008. Leveraging botnets, spammers have infected several thousand pages which display prominent keywords from the Google Trends site by bypassing the CAPTCHA authentication method, which had previously subdued all spam bloggers. A recent sighting puts the top ten Google hottest terms of the day as all being owned by spambots on the Blog Results page. As they have gone mostly unchecked, they have also infected real SERP Page One web results and corrupt any hot search terms more than a month old. Hackers are using a number of methods including link farming, spamdexing and keyword stuffing each in a simple, moderated form to achieve top PageRank results. Most of the sites contain an animated graphic which appears as a YouTube streaming video. Once clicked, users become infected with one of several variants of spyware. This generates revenue for the spambot's owner.