REDMOND, Washington: Researchers at Microsoft Corp. have come out with a new tool to contain spammers using search engines to direct net traffic to spam sites. The tool, Strider Search Defender, detects spam URLs, usually passed on through social networking and forum and blog hosting websites and prevents them from being indexed by search engines.
Yi-Min Wang, group manager of the cyber security and systems management research group at Microsoft Research, said the tool uses part of a technology developed in Microsoft Research to search forums that have been spammed and to identify spam URLs in the hope of removing them before they are indexed by search engines. The tool is capable of distinguishing between legitimate URLs on web forums and spam URLs.
Elaborating on how spammers make their large scale presence on the web, Wang said instead of commenting on user pages of popular forums and blog sites, they post "comment spam," which are actually URLs of spam websites, in as many internet forum pages as they can. As these URLs remain present on valid websites, search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN inadvertently index them and they will begin appearing in search results.
He said the tool can identity the domain that is being exploited by spammers when they use what is known as "doorway domain" and alert system administrators.
Microsoft Research also brought out an information report to educate owners of free web-hosting sites, search engines and publicly accessible web forums on how to prevent spammers from exploiting search engines.
Wang said free web-hosting sites like MySpace and Google BlogSpot can make use of the report to identify spammers, who would be using the sites as doorway domains.
Wang said, "By cleaning up web search, hopefully we can discourage spammers from cluttering the web with spam."
Strider Search Defender works by first listing confirmed spam addresses. A spam hunter part of the tool then runs these addresses through search engines to find pages that link to the spam sites, using the "link:" query tag. Spam URLs found on those sites are, in turn, run through the Spam Hunter, resulting in a long list of potential spam sites. Then, using another tool, Strider URL Tracer, false positives are filtered out and a list of web pages that redirect to spam sites is compiled.
