Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

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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