Recently active topics in Twitter tagged with link farm spammers

I wanted to alert everyone to some techniques that Twitter spammers are using. This is from a blog post from an SEO blog: http://snurl.com/246e0 . I'm not sure what the best way is to fight these techniques. Any ideas?

Here are some of the techniques described in this post:

1) Setting up a script to follow then un-follow people with the goal of keeping the Follower / Following ration about equal. This is very deceptive and puts an unnecessary strain on Twitter's servers. Twitter, whatever algorithm you're building to detect spammers should look for this kind of activity - i.e. the Following / Followers ratio isn't going to be enough.

2) Using a script to retweet random tweets from the public timeline. This adds zero value and once again, is an unnecessary strain on Twitter's servers.

3) And the nastiest of them all - using a CSRF (Cross Site Reference Forgery) on the spammer's web site so that the unsuspecting Twitter user follows the spammer without even knowing it. From the blog post...

"You can assume that at least some of the people you follow will check out your twitter page and then click through to see your webpage. Armed with this knowledge, you can get them to follow you back without them even realizing it. You do this with a little CSRF. On your page, call out this url: http://twitter.com/friendships/create.... Since they just came from your Twitter profile, you know they are logged in to Twitter. By calling out that url, you tell the Twitter system to make their account follow you. You have to set this up in such a way that you scrub out the referrer on the request, so a simple 1px iframe won't cut it. I'll leave that part to you guys to figure out."

I was notified about an hour ago of a new follower with this message: "Jarret Coon (Jmcoon) is now following your updates on Twitter." As is the case whenever I get such notices, I clicked to check Jarret's profile and evaluate whether he was relevant to my life.

When I arrived at Jmcoon's profile, I was greeted with an unusual bio ("Jarret is a 14 year old technologist and financial guru...") and a bizarre following-follower ratio of about 29:5600. A spammer seeking connection with recent twitterers would have the inverse ratio, with many more people he is following than those who are following him. Even more peculiar, the links to show the 29 accounts Jmcoon is following shows no one.

I'm pretty certain I am not following Jmcoon, and I can't see a reason why 5000+ people would be following this person. If something isn't fishy here, more power to Jarret the 14-year-old tech guru. If something is fishy, how did it happen?

agoraindex just spammed me, it led me back to his blogpot weblog which features this as today's post:

Friday, June 13, 2008
How To Attract FREE Internet Traffic
Here's tip for you to attract free internet traffic to your blog or website. Get twitter account. Add 10,000+ "followers" .. add anyone / everyone .. find ur targets / prospects using your industry "bait" or keywords, etc .. exploit by linking your twitter account to your account on myspace or to your website for extreme exposure of your products/service, life or pleasure .. watch ur traffic explode.

>>> Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Jaiku, MyBlogLog, Zimbio, Qassia, Cyber-Robotics, Feedburner, Technorati ..

>>> If u r in the entertainment industry, u can combine the above with music distribution companies (ShowcaseYourMusic, SongCastMusic) with the power of Myspace, Eventful, Blip, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Social Networks to unleash your music; .. google it; "music+distribution+service" .. or/and .. "music+distribution+services"...
Posted by AGORAINDEX on Friday, June 13, 2008 0 comments Links to this post