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Trackback spam abuse and prevention
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Trackback spam abuse and prevention

Available Media Publication (PDF) Slides (PDF)
Conference Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW) - 2009
Authors Elie Bursztein , Peifung E. Lam , John C. Mitchell
Citation BibTeX
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Bursztein2009Trackback,
  title = {Trackback spam abuse and prevention},
  author = {Elie Bursztein and Peifung E. Lam and John C. Mitchell},
  booktitle = {Cloud Computing Security Workshop},
  year = {2009},
  organization = {ACM}
}

Contemporary blogs receive comments and TrackBacks, which result in cross-references between blogs. We conducted a longitudinal study of TrackBack spam, collecting and analyzing almost 10 million samples from a massive spam campaign over a one-year period. Unlike common delivery of email spam, the spammers did not use bots, but took advantage of an official Chinese site as a relay. Based on our analysis of TrackBack misuse found in the wild, we propose an authenticated TrackBack mechanism that defends against TrackBack spam even if attackers use a very large number of different source addresses and generate unique URLs for each TrackBack blog.

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