Craig Burton

Bloggers spammed? What really happened...: "

Why would a spammer want to hit the bloggers? It could be because bloggers speak their minds about everything and are the most vocal of people on the planet. Signing in to Typepad that day and realizing that the entire Six Apart was down was obviously cause for concern.

I also have to admit that it felt good to know as a blogger that what we write was so threatening to somebody that an artful spammer was hired to take us out. Temporarily of course - the problem was fixed in about 12 hours and we are back with our cacophony but what really happened here?

As the news came out the plot became murkier and more amusing as it came to light that it was an antispam firm that was attacked and it was this firm which deflected the attack on to Sixapart of which typepad is a part of. Strange huh? Well after swallowing some humble pie I accepted that the spammer’s intention was to hit the anti-spam firm.

Eran Reshef, CEO of Blue Security Inc., an Israeli antispam firm, said his company was attacked by a major spammer named PharmaMaster who used a combination of methods to knock out the company’s Web site and the servers hosting its services.

This from a firm, which provides

"
I have 5000 spammers that have joined my blog. No kidding more than 5000. I quit after deleting about 2000. Epidemic. Poker, prescriptions and porn made up the bulk of the spam.