Providing a dangerous combination of “Free Web Tools” with minimal, if any, responsible supervision is a sure-fire recipe for attracting and retaining spammers in your network.
Bravenet has made itself a comfortable home for spammers with it’s BraveJournal.com blogging pages. As just one example, you can find countless copies of this spam image hosted on BraveJournal.com:
BraveJournal Spam Page
To find live examples, search for:
“what other medicines” site:bravejournal.com
That search will return many BraveJournal pages containing the identical spam landing image which is used exclusively for selling online medications, most of which link to Chinese based domains.
What’s worse, many of these pages have been up and active for months, clearly demonstrating that Bravenet has weak monitoring for spam abuses, if they have any active anti-spam enforcement at all.
And why would they? Since Bravenet primarily offers “free websites and tools” a significant source of their income likely comes from the banner ads they place at the top of such blog pages. The result is that they appear to have a financial incentive for looking the other way while spammers overrun their site.
For perspective as to how abused BraveJournal blog sites are, consider that an email containing the “BraveJournal.com” domain currently rates a 98.8% probability of being spam when sent to users within the OnlyMyEmail Spam Filtering network.
While there’s no telling how many of the pages on their site are spam versus legitimate user blogs, for practical purposes, if an email contains a link to the “BraveJournal.com” domain, then odds are overwhelming that it’s spam. Exceptions do exist, of course. An example of a legitimate email containing a link to their blogs might be an email discussing how much spam BraveJournal actually hosts.
To add to this effectiveness of the spam campaigns, the majority of the BraveJournal.com blog spam landing pages reviewed host their spam marketing images on another poorly supervised network: Microsoft’s http://skydrive.live.com system. This site offers “25 GB of Free Online Storage” via “livefilestore.com” servers.
This is a great service for Spammers to abuse as you can host a really impressive amount of spam campaign images with 25 GB of disposable storage for each free account you open.
To find the same spam graphic as above, as hosted on Live.com, search:
newpic.gif site:live.com
Clearly Microsoft’s Live hosting site is also poorly monitored for spam abuses as emails passing through the OnlyMyEmail Spam Filtering system with a “livefilestore.com” domain rate an even higher likelihood of being garbage with a 98.9% spam probability.
Using these free tools in order to more effectively conduct spam e-commerce, spammers can:
- Host 25 GB spam images per account via Microsoft’s servers
- Load the spam images into free LiveJournal Blogs
- Hyperlink the images to their Chinese domains (or anywhere else they choose)
- Email spam containing links to the LiveJournal blog sites
This multilevel process provides enough layers of separation to no doubt make it difficult for many simplistic spam filters, and especially user controlled filters and hardware devices, to reliably stop.
This tactic is a real win for the spammers in terms of their ability to deliver spam and conduct e-commerce for their questionable products, and especially since neither LiveJournal or Microsoft appear to be aggressive about removing the abuses.
It’s a win for LiveJournal which gains banner ad impressions.
It’s even a win for Microsoft as all the external links to their hosted images brings increased search engine rankings for their Live and Skydrive properties and also brings visitors directly to these domains as well.
The only losers are the the spam recipients and also probably those foolish enough to buy controlled substances from such marketing campaigns in hopes that they’re receiving high-quality and safe medications from spammers sold via servers in China.
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