Tailrank Bombarded With Spamz
Viagra. Ultram. Vicodin. Thanks for the headlines. When I logged onto my computer today, I didn’t expect to be bombarded with links to splogs. I took some screenshots that you can see below.
For those of you who don’t know, Tailrank is a popular memetracker. There are lots of memetrackers, actually.Its function is to post recently popular posts from recently popular blogs. But today, there seems to be a misstep.
I am very surprised with you Tailrank. You have splogs on your home page…Why is this?
I think I am the first person to blog this, and I just want to give you the news. I think that Tailrank has made a series of missteps.
Firstly, last week their tools were offline. Don’t know why, although it was probably because of some programming errors.
Now this. If I funded Tailrank, I would be very upset right now. How will they get investors now?
Kevin Burton
July 23rd 2007 - 8:07am
It’s just spam…. it hits the best of us unfortunately. The amount of spam on Tailrank vs other sites is amazingly low…
Micahville
July 23rd 2007 - 1:17pm
No worries. I was just surprised to see it. I had never seen very much spam on TechMeMe before, so I wasn’t expecting it. How did it happen?
P.S. Do you know why the Tailrank tools were offline last week?
Kevin Burton
July 23rd 2007 - 1:57pm
We’re still trying to fully put together the attack. It looks like spammers compromised a bunch of weblogs and also a bunch of .edu sites and were using the .edus for gateways.
We’ll try to post on it later tonight.
What do you mean Tailrank tools were broken? Like the URL was 404ing?
KEvin
Micahville
July 23rd 2007 - 5:09pm
Si, I was getting some 404 messages, or there were some issues with the server. It seems to be fixed now though.
Kevin Burton
July 23rd 2007 - 5:13pm
We HAVE noticed a bug with Apache that we’re working around. Oddly enough it’s the same Apache install that we’ve been running for 2 years.
Anyway… Glad it’s fixed now!!!