Since last week, we have been looking at various ways that web spammers have been abusing functionality of websites, particularly on websites at major universities, to place spam content on them. The final element that we noticed at this time involves software designed by and for universities. The software, Manifold, is there to allow handling a library of documents. It also includes a feature for public reading groups, which spammers have been abusing, as can be seen on this website from the University of Virginia:
As is usual, if you allow the public to put content on a website, web spammers will start abusing.
If you have a website that has web spam content placed on it, we can help you to get it cleaned up and hardened to avoid additional issues.