
Spammers started to hit GitHub? - bencevans
https://github.com/quartzjer/TeleHash/issues/5
======
ck2
The amount of time and energy and cpu cycles wasted on spammers is truly a
crime against humanity.

I still do not understand how it makes them money, I think it's just an
endless chain of people falsely thinking others are successful with it so they
try to do it too and the cycle continues.

~~~
xSwag
>I still do not understand how it makes them money

When I saw this post the page had 404d. However, the page was still active in
the Google cache[1]

It is not just Github being targeted, a lot of other large websites with user
generated content are also being spammed with this content[2][3]

The spammers are linking the content to blogspot blogs so that they can: 1\.
hide the referrer from their affiliate program (to prevent getting banned for
spamming) 2\. to utilize the temp increase in search engine rankings 3\. save
money on domains for one-off usage

Since the "live stream" is just a one-off game that will only be
popular/trending for 1-3 days in which period the spammers will use a lot of
macro scripts/bots to spam these websites. Believe it or not, even a
"nofollow" link can give you an advantage in search rankings. They spam them
to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the affiliate
program[4]

[1][http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fquartzjer%2FTeleHash%2Fissues%2F5)
[2][http://shine.yahoo.com/author-blog-posts/watch-38-enjoy-
flor...](http://shine.yahoo.com/author-blog-posts/watch-38-enjoy-florida-st-
vs-maryland-live-081500525.html)
[3][http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.f...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.funnyordie.com%2Flists%2F58f182726b%2Fwatch-
ncaa-florida-state-vs-maryland-live-stream-college-football-week-12-online-
satellite-tv%3Frel%3Dby_user)
[4][http://www.officialtvstream.com.es/passport/signup.php?price...](http://www.officialtvstream.com.es/passport/signup.php?price_group=-478&product_id=80&hide_paysys=ccbill)

~~~
sillysaurus
_They spam them to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the
affiliate program_

If you had to speculate: How much money?

(I know, it all depends, etc. But I was just hoping to get a rough idea of the
order of magnitude here.)

~~~
xSwag
Full disclosure: I frequent private "blackhat" forums and although I do not
participate in these activities, I blog about them anonymously. Furthermore, I
know a few people (online) who do stuff similar to this with CPA content
lockers, so I'll try and give you an educated guess. In general the average
conversion rate in the TV show/live content is around 0.5-3% depending on the
quality of traffic.

Now, as you can see from Google Trends[1] some of these get very popular and
trend once pretty much every year. In the second comparison, I've compared the
search terms with a term I know is definitely popular to get relative
popularity of the terms [2]. Comparing these two terms I can get an idea of
the amount of traffic these website would get in the time period. I would
estimate that the "big spammers" would easily get around 250k-500k uniques
from multiple sources (spamming, mass advertising, social media, botnets etc).

Assuming they get paid $2 every signup, and have a conversion rate of 1.5%
with 300k uniques, it would bank them around $9k, of course I'm only talking
about the big guys here who have done this for a long time.

In general, I would say that the following is correct:

Upper quartile average: $1-3k per day for a few days

Lower quartile average: $50-60 per day for a few days

Quick edit: It should also be noted that for these live games over 95% of the
traffic will be from the USA hence the large profits.

\---------

[1][http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland&cmpt=q)

[2][http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland%2C%20anonymous%20hack&cmpt=q)

------
jeremymcanally
We're aware of the problem. Just like any service like ours, we see a fair
amount of spam repos, issues/comments, and, of course, Gists. We already
expend a good bit of energy on handling it as it is, but we're always working
on new ways to handle it. :)

~~~
driverdan
It'd be nice if gists had a link to report them as spam. Also, links in gists
should be nofollow.

------
waffle_ss
This is nothing new. If you watch the [new gist feed][1], for instance, you'll
see plenty of it roll by.

[1]: <https://gist.github.com/gists>

~~~
driverdan
What's especially interesting is that gists are allowed by github's robot.txt
and none of the links are nofollow. That means every gist spammers create with
links are helping their ranking.

------
AshleysBrain
All large sites get hammered by automatic/semi-automatic spam, and
occasionally some leaks through. Is this surprising?

~~~
Zak
_All_ sites get hammered by automatic spam. If it gets indexed by google, or
if anybody links to it, the spam bots will find it eventually.

It is not practical to operate any kind of website that allows users to post
things without some form of spam protection. For small sites, email
verification or text classification will do the job by itself. Traditional
captchas are fairly ineffective, but written questions like "what color rhymes
with true?" seem to work pretty well for smaller sites.

Bigger sites dealing with a larger volume of traffic almost always require
regular human intervention, curated IP block lists, stealth banning and the
like.

------
Gigablah
Reported the blogspot link as a spam blog. Not sure about Google's response
time on these things.

------
dutchbrit
I don't understand spammers that target tech sites - especially the ones that
add nofollows, techies know spam and don't click the shit. Waste of time,
effort and money for the spamlords to be honest

~~~
thedufer
As others have said, nofollows do give you help in search results, although
not as much as otherwise. They're looking to rise in search results more than
for legitimate clicks.

------
hk__2
404 error.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Every time I mention this on HN, at least 15 people upvote it - which means
they didn't know about it. So I feel obliged to repeat it again and again _(as
I usually use this method a few times every week and it's tremendously useful
for me)_ :

If you want to get Google's cached version of a webpage, just type

    
    
        cache:[url]
        e.g.: cache:https://github.com/quartzjer/TeleHash/issues/5
    

in the search bar and press return.

~~~
uxp
*in Chrome's search bar.

I know, it's a petty technicality. Safari says it can't open the specified
address, and Firefox doesn't understand the URL. I'm even more certain IE will
explode if I was to try, but I can't at the moment. From what I remember, IE
can't even parse a raw IP address without explicitly putting <http://> in
front of it.

~~~
pooriaazimi
You're right. But you can do a `cache:<http://...`> in google.com's search
bar, which is how I do it. And unless I'm mistaken, Chrome's built-in search
bar is called OmniBar, so my wording was (incidentally) correct! ;-)

------
vidar
This must have been a problem for some time, considering how popular GitHub
is. There is no way around spam when running a popular service where the users
can create their own content.

~~~
daGrevis
What about old-good CAPTCHA? There are many ways, but all are annoying for
normal users.

~~~
DizzyDoo
Even the best captcha methods can be circumvented by farming them out to
poorer countries for only pennies.

~~~
ceejayoz
There's an even cheaper way - host a porn gallery, and require a captcha to
access it. Present the captcha you're trying to solve to the horny user.

------
buttscicles
I noticed some spammers a couple of weeks ago, they occasionally create
repositories too.

I'm not sure if there is a way to report them, there is nothing no the GH
contact form.

~~~
Heliosmaster
I'm quite confident a story on top of HN is a good way to reach them :D

~~~
sudhirj
I suppose it is... it's not like it's some security hole that everyone is
going to exploit. I'm sure they're already working on spam filtering and
reporting.

------
beagle3
Proper etiquette would be to let the github people know for a few days before
you alert the whole world.

Have you notified them before posting this?

~~~
reitzensteinm
This isn't a security flaw, it's just mundane crap that every web app goes
through. They'll delete this today and tweak their filtering, and tomorrow the
spammer will try again (or in twenty minutes, who am I kidding?).

I'm not sure why you say prior notification is proper etiquette in this
circumstance. It's equivalent to pointing out a grammar mistake in a blog
post. Not particularly interesting, but not malicious.

------
jpdoctor
Looks like git needs the equivalent of a downvote: Something like % git nuke
<https://github.com/quartzjer>

~~~
dasil003
git != github

~~~
jpdoctor
git = communication with github, but more importantly, many of the github
clones are going to have the same problem.

