Tricky Spam
August 20th, 2009
Some evil spammer managed to hack my blog and add some stuff that injects spam into the RSS feed (but only visible in Google Reader and a number of other RSS readers, not visible when viewed directly)
Thankfully Anwyn’s Notes had the tips to get me on the trail although in my case the evil code was in a different but similarly named file.
Hopefully when I view this post in Google Reader the problem will have been resolved.
Update: Hooray! Google Reader has refreshed and spam is banished.
I use Firefox’s live bookmarks, and I never saw a thing…
Yes, the code was rather specific, probably so that the owner of the blog doesn’t notice. It was targeted at search engines such as yahoo, bing and google amongst a dozen others – it just so happens that the google reader bot matched the activation criteria so the spammy content showed up for users of google reader (and apparently My Yahoo and other online services where a bot reads the RSS rather than a browser)