Monday, 24 July 2006

Microsoft Develops Tool to Fight Web Spam

Spam messages have become a menace spreading it lethal wings from e-mails to invading message board. In an attempt to end this spam invasion Microsoft has launched a new...

Spam messages have become a menace spreading it lethal wings from e-mails to invading message board. In an attempt to end this spam invasion Microsoft has launched a new project to seek out search engine spam. The tool developed by the company is aimed at preventing web spammers from exploiting Internet search engines to drive traffic to spam uniform resource locators (URLs).

Spammers target message board for the simple reason that Google and other search engines rank pages by the number of sites that link to them. If enough fake posts are made to pointing to the spam site, the pages may appear in the top page of results for legitimate searches.

The project by Microsoft Research is headed by Yi-Min Wang, group manager of the Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group in Microsoft Research, and focuses on a major problem now plaguing the Web: blog spam.

"They create a URL they want people to click and they put that into every possible open forum and guest book they can," Wang said. "Some search engines will see that this URL is everywhere on the Web so it should be popular. But it doesn't have the kind of relevance to be in the top search-engine results."

Strider Search Defender combines technology such as HoneyMonkey and Typo Patrol, previously developed by the company, to search forums that have been spammed and to identify spam URLs. The tool also has an element to differentiate between legitimate URLs on Web forums and spam URLs, Wang said.

The tool can also identify ‘doorway domain’, which is used by the spammers to set up a spam site so it looks like a valid Web site to fool users and search engines. The tool can identity the domain that is being exploited and alert its administrators.

"If they put [what looks like a] blog URL into your forum and everyone else’s, they will fool the search engine," Wang said.

Microsoft Research has released the details of the tool along with published information in its report to encourage owners of free Web-hosting sites, search engines and publicly accessible Web forums to do what they can to prevent Web spammers from exploiting search engines.

Wang said that Web-hosting sites can address the problem by shutting down sites that are still online but are no longer used or visited.