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Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

Throw it against the wall, see if it sticks.

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Harmless but Annoying, or a Scam?

27 June 2008 by Peter

I’ve had an egocentric Google Alert set up on “spaghetti testing” for a few months now – mostly what comes in are people blogging about what they ate last night, announcements of fundraising suppers that involve spaghetti and programmers complaining about noodly code. I think maybe once or twice somebody said something about this blog …

But this week I’ve been getting a daily alert that quotes the same bit of my post from last Friday:

Civil Service Test
By jhdibvrx236(jhdibvrx236)
Civil Service Test Louisiana . in an effort to see what sticks (like a spaghetti test, see?), I think there are obvious links with the GoC’s current PS Renewal agenda. After all, if you are looking to attract digital natives to come …
<http://civil-service-test.blogspot.com/2008/06/civil-service-test_27.html&gt;
Civil Service Test
<http://civil-service-test.blogspot.com/&gt;

I’ve highlighted the quoted bit. They’re always from the same blog, this civil-service-test thing on Blogspot, but the full path of the URL is different each time – so different posts on the blog.

So the first couple of times this showed up, I clicked through to the post, and all I saw was a blank page. WTF?

OK so there’s something weird here. My guesses as to what this might be: spam blog of some sort, phishing, drive by downloads or some kind of data collecting scheme.

I checked the domain and URL out using McAffee site advisor (hasn’t been tested) and Google’s safe browsing diagnostic (not listed as suspicious, but not been tested during the last 90 days).

I’m sure that there are other ways to check this thing out, but I haven’t taken the time to find out what they may be.

Basically I have no idea if this would be something that’s harmless but annoying, or if it’s something more sinister.

Any ideas out there as to what might be going on here? What is the scam?

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Posted in blogosphere | Tagged Google alerts, safe browsing, scams, spam | 5 Comments

5 Responses

  1. on 27 June 2008 at 12:38 pm Justin Kerr-Stevens

    Hi Peter,

    I clicked through on the same site – pages isn’t blank the content is just further down. Not a lot of it makes sense…


  2. on 27 June 2008 at 1:40 pm Peter

    of course… I hadn’t even tried to scroll. It looks like a broken page template or something. Content makes me think spam blog – I guess I’ve been scraped. Prolly harmless but annoying…

    BTW thanks for the blogroll link!


  3. on 27 June 2008 at 2:08 pm jkerrstevens

    No problems. Look forward to reading more.


  4. on 27 June 2008 at 4:47 pm Big Money Trove Team

    Hi we are looking to build up our incoming links for our blog Big Treasure Trove.
    Would you like to exchange blogroll links with us?
    If yes, please visit: http://bigmoneytrove.blogspot.com/
    and leave your URL for your blog there. We’ll link to you within hours. Thanks.


  5. on 27 June 2008 at 10:48 pm Peter

    Ha ha, that’s too funny. Was about to send this comment to spam purgatory, but no. I’ll leave it. So thanks but no thanks big money blogging persons, I don’t want to exchange blogroll links.



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