Fighting malware and spam

Blogspot spam

February 2008

Clicking on the link took me to an empty page containing only a link saying: "If you are not redirected click here". Almost immediately the page was redirected to another website.

I was curious so I downloaded the HTML code from blogspot.com. It contained only the following:

<meta content='0;URL=http://www.site.com' http-equiv='refresh'/>

I was certain that this was illegal code on the blogspot.com system, so I decided to test it for myself. I created a blog on blogspot.com, available here.

Here is how I created the post:

As can be seen in the screenshot above, the system detected that the tags I had attempted to use were illegal and it produced a warning message and even blocked the post. However, when the tick box entitled "Stop showing title or body HTML errors for this post" was checked, there were no such errors or warnings and the system will created my post with the code exactly as I'd written it (see below).

The post was published successfully and it even works - the page is redirected to www.avira.com after (approx.) 10 seconds.

Blogspot.com has been informed about this and the spam blog has been submitted to them for investigation.

Sorin Mustaca, Avira