Abstract
With the explosive expansion of information on the world wide web, search engines are becoming more significant in the day-to-day lives of humans. Even though a search engine generally gives huge number of results for certain query, the majority of the search engine users simply view the first few web pages in result lists. Consequently, the ranking position has become a most important concern of internet service providers. This article addresses the vulnerabilities, spamming attacks, and countermeasures in blogging sites. In the first part, the article explores the spamming types and detailed section on vulnerabilities. In the next part, an attack scenario of form spamming is presented, and defense approach is presented. Consequently, the aim of this article is to provide review of vulnerabilities, threats of spamming associated with blogging websites, and effective measures to counter them.
TopTypes Of Web Spamming
Content Spamming
Content Spamming is the first and most widespread type of web spam because it exploits search engines based information retrieval models. These models are build from page contents which further ranks the pages on the bases of the page rank algorithms. As the result the spammers analyse the weakness of these models being implemented and exploit them. The different types of content spamming are Title spamming, Body spamming, Meta tag spamming, Anchor Text spamming, URL spamming (Henzinger, 2007).
As the title field is very important in the information retrieval, spammers try to overfill it in order to increase the page rank and this type of spamming where one overfills the title is called title spamming. In body spamming the body of the page is modified and injected with certain content or queries that are frequently searched. The meta-tags play a special role in document description as when we use search algorithm n search engines the results are fetched on the bases of the meta-tags on the webpage. So placing the spam in this content will be the most efficient way to spam the document (called meta-tag spamming). Anchors tag are the tags used to include links on the website so in anchor spamming the spammers create the links with the desired anchor text to get the right term for the target page. In URL spamming the content to be searched is itself injected to the URL.
Link Spamming
There are two main categories of link spamming namely
- 1.
Outgoing Link spamming, in this the spammers have direct access to the page and can therefore add any content to the web page. They can easily copy the entire web catalogue.
- 2.
Incoming link spamming, where the spammers try to raise the Page Rank and boost the number of incoming links to the page (Gyongyi et al., 2008).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Vulnerability: It is defined as a defect, imperfection, weakness, or inadequacy of a system.
Form Spam: It is a method of submitting web forms with unwanted information.
Threat: The possibility of malicious attempt to damage or disrupt a computer or system.
Spamming: It is an exploitation of messaging systems to broadcast unwanted messages.
Click Spam: It is a process of executing clicks on behalf of user without the knowledge of user.
Link Spamming: The process of posting links on websites, discussion forums, blogs, and other web services that show user comments.