The Randolf Jorberg Blog

If Matt Cutts says that the Googlebomb Problem was solved using a new algorythm that must be correct. After all it THE Matt Cutts from all-beloved Search-Engine Giant Google! Or is it possible that they lie to you? Why do they still claim that everything on Google’s result pages is still ordered by algorythms? Because it’s still done the manual way, they still don’t get the ’smaller’ language-specific Googlebombs like the case of ‘völlige inkompetenz‘ (complete incompetence in german) that ranks the austrian politician Karl-Heinz Grasser #1 when searching for it with Google:

funny enough: when the safe search is activated the politicians webpage does not appear in the Google results. Does it mean that Google thinks of this Politician’s (empty) homepage as an adult site?

There were too many lies about Googlebombing-Algos on the internet - hope that stops somehow soon. Google just started manually modifying their rankings on a massive scale and tries to hide that from their observers.

On a side note: the most impressive changes in the search rankings due to the manual anti googlebomb ‘algo’ was caused for the term ‘exit‘. Before Google shuffled the results the Top 3 spots were occupied by disney.com, Google and Yahoo, who’re linked by tens of thousand adult sites with an ‘exit’ button on their index page but that is gone by now.

SPAM / Scam mails are just getting more personal. This mail wasn’t catched by my spam-filter and cought my attention, because it’s the first spam mail that mentions my correct first and last name.

From: “LINDA SMITH”
To: (email address only used for whois)
Subject: Confidential letter to Randolf Jorberg
Hi Randolf Jorberg

RE: BENTLEY28722662/726-099Randolf Jorberg

I am delighted to announce to you an award from Bentley organization.

Via a computer ballot system conducted by Bentley as part of their Easter promotions for the year 2007, your name and email address came up in a random draw for a cash award of $300,000 (Three hundred thousand United States Dollars only).

Your award winning number is: BENTLEY28722662, ticket number 726-099. You are strongly adviced to keep your winning confidential. Hense contact your claims executive immediately to begin processing your cash award winning.

Mr. Robert West

E-mail: robertwestmail@sify.com

Please email the following details to Mr. Robert West your claims executive:

Your full name ,Your telephone number including area code, your cellular phone number (most importantly including area code)

Your fax number including area code

Your recent email address and mailing address (for delivery of your certified check)

Your reference number: BENTLEY28722662/726-099Randolf Jorberg

Your claims executive shall provide you detailed information about the promotions and also advice you on how to receive your cash award. Your certified check has been issued and currently with your claims agent hence contact him for further information.

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY THIS EMAIL RATHER CONTACT ONLY YOUR CLAIMS AGENT

Congratulations on your success in this years Bently promotions award

Linda

Regional cordinator

Data (including my full name) is obviously taken from domain whois data and I wonder what this spam mails purpose might be: simple data (lead) generation or is there going to be a follow up answer with some kind of phishing attempt? Anyone got the same mails?

As we’re Registerfly customers ourself and we’re not able to get our Domains out of their account I wanted to share a quick find for a quick laugh on the current Registerfly-case: In some published court documents you find this gem:

“Defendant [Kevin Medina] has wasted UNI’s assets by, among others: (a) wiring $9,000 in UNI funds on three seperate occasions to pay for the company of Defendant’s personal escort, (b) using UNI funds to pay the $10,000 monthly rent on Defendant’s personal penthouse residence in Miami Beach, FLorida; (c) spending tens of thousands of dollars from UNI’s accounts to pay for Defendant’s personal credit card bills; (d) spending approximately $6,000 of UNI’ money for liposuction; and (e) unaccountably withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash from UNI’s accounts for Defendant’s personal spending.“

Hey - how simply can’t run a business properly, if you spend all your time spending money!
If you haven’t got the whole story: Read this at the excellent customer-blog Registerflies or here. BTW: Registerfly isn’t that big as they appear - 63% of their domains are actually .info domains that were given away heavily discounted or even for free.
The real reason for all the chaos and the court actions seems to be a non-working 50/50 partnership between John Naruszewicz and Kevin Medina. Now John is trying to squeeze Kevin out of their company by publishing all this dirt - the whole document is a real how-to-NOT business documentary…

When writing about the stalkertrack myspace tracker scam I didn’t speak about the service in itself, as users are promised access to it, but will never ever receive it from stalkertrack.com. But the whole issue of profile trackers at Myspace is indeed interesting and worth an extra post. At the Washington Post Security Fix Brian Krebs covered that a few months ago, but only gave a vague idea about the technical details and possibilities on myspace.

There are two different kind of myspace tracking services out there. Those who go with the Myspace TOS and those who don’t. The legitimate services (like profilesnitch.com) can only show the data that every homepage owner can gather from his visitors: the visitors location (via ip), time, operating system, etc. The latter ones can show you the profile nickname, picture and even the registered email address of every myspace user visiting your profile on top! This surely is a serious privacy leakage that myspace needs to fix permanently. The illegitimate services are only stopped from working, as Myspace manually deactivates them, as their hide-and-seek continues. Using custom hosted scripts (available via ebay (1, 2) and other scripts that are not publicly sold like “Project Tenyer” the script used by stalkertrack.com, you can circumvent this limitation and host the scripts yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve seen myspace phishing attempts before and all the email scams before relied on sending the user to a myspace-lookalike site where he was asked to login. Now a new scam is threatening the myspace community. And this time the bad guys upgraded to web2.0 and took phishing, spamming and viral marketing techniques to create a new dangerous mashup.
You have probably seen the following messages in the myspace comments lately: “See who is spying on your MySpace page! Start tracking your profile lurkers!” or “Hey, I can see who looks at my profile! Now you can see everyone who looks at your MySpace page! Click here to start tracking your profile visitors!“

If friends recommend you use such a service, you certainly want to check that out. Clicking the linked URL downloadthefox.net redirects you to www.stalkertrack.com/super/ where you are promised a myspace-tool to “Track viewers who viewed your page and give you their: Picture, Username, Link to their page, and when (date) they viewed your page!“. Users don’t like to read, so they’ll most likely forget to take note that the site says that the tool is not yet released and they’re not signing up for the service but just entering their myspace login data in a “Tracker Promoter Form”. After submitting your login details you will not be given any other information, you simply will be redirected to a page showing some ads. Stalkertrack will then use your personal myspace-account to comment on all your friends pages, so they’ll be fooled as well, helping stalkertrack.com’s network grow bigger and bigger.

If you read the fine print you’ll be told the whole thruth:

“Terms of Use / Privacy Policy:

By filling out this form, you authorize us to spread the word
about this 100% real and ONLY working profile viewer. You will receive your
share of the credit in helping us launch the tracker. This is a harmless
profile tracker site that is coming soon looking to spread the word about our plans!

We do not share your private information with any third parties.
We do not “SPAM” people with commercial messages nor do we
collect any information to be used outside the scope of this
free tell-a-friends promotion! This is not a “phishing” site
that attempts to “trick” you into revealing personal information.
Everything we do with your information is disclosed here.
…
We may do a combination of the following based on your friends’ interest.
1. Temporarily access your MySpace account for the following purpose(s).
2. Post “tracker information” bulletins in the appropriate section.
3. Comment your friends about this tracker.
4. Introduce new entertaining sites.
This is a free service. You will not be asked to pay at any time.
You will not be subscribed to anything asking for payment.
This service is made possible by many hours of human effort.

Result: There are currently more than 1.4 million myspace-profiles indexed by google that show one of these two messages. It’s not easy to estimate the number of myspace-accounts stalkertrack.com was able to phish and the curious visitors pushed the site up to an Alexa rank in the Top 5000. The simple nature of this scam is easy to copy so other evil marketers will surely get even more viral ideas for distribution. This is a new threat, that we’ll definitely see in increasing numbers in the future.
Conclusion: Even if they say it isn’t: Stalkertrack will abuse your phished Myspace-Account to spam all your friends profiles with advertisements for their not-yet-working service and other ‘entertaining sites’. If you’ve entered your login at stalkertrack.com, change your password immediately and check your friends comments area, if ‘you’ have already spammed it. Send this link to your friends, if they’ve posted an advert for stalkertrack in your comments area, so that they can stop the people that spam using identity. Myspace will hopefully remove all the Stalkertrack postings and inform the users later, but if you don’t trust myspace, do it yourself.

If you want to remove comments made by stalkertrack-infected users you’ll see that you can’t do so with your Internet Explorer, because the hackers used some nasty tricks. You’ll need to install a safe browser like to easily delete these nasty comments.
German article about Stalkertrack is on gulli.com

… is brand new - so please handle with care.There were some earlier approaches to blogging for me, but they never worked as I wished they would. I may feel like pasting some old posts from old forgotten blogs into this wordpress at a later time, so don’t be surprised if this isn’t going to be the first entry forever.
This is gonna be me, Randolf Jorberg, aka. ‘gulli‘ and a few other temporary nicknames, blogging about stuff that matters - for me I’ll try to keep this blog english languaged but with a heavy emphasis on german topics. I’m into all aspects of online marketing (specially affiliate marketing and search engine optimization) and the internet business to interesting discoveries on the net and maybe even some viral stuff floating around. There may be a german-only post every here and then, but I guess you’ll figure that out yourself You can expect me to write about stuff I care about whenever I feel that I’ve got something to commit to a discussion. This will never be a blog where I tell you about all the News that you can read about at so many different places. If you’re interested, subscribe to the feed, as there may be month-long breaks where I don’t post at all.Oh - and I nearly forgot: http://gul.li used to be the index-site of the gulli blog-hosting service - this info-site moved into our tools-section where you find info how to get your own blog at yourname.gul.li. Edit: this is outdated as since selling gulli.com I moved all content from gul.li to http://randolf.jorberg.com in early 2008.