Social spam is taking over the Internet

April 03, 2012, 3:06 PM — Remember when the most onerous chore of the day was emptying your email inbox of all the Viagra, bogus home loan, and XXX spam? Nowadays a decent filter will catch at least 95 percent of the junk. That’s why those same spammers – the ones not doing time, at least – have moved onto social networks, where the payoffs are much better and the dirty deeds harder to detect.

Social spammers can make up to ten times more money than email spammers, according to Impermium, a social Web security vendor that polices the commenting networks on sites like Time.com and CNN.com. The reason? A single spam post can be viewed thousands of times, and people are more likely to trust something they’ve seen on Facebook or Twitter from one of their “friends,” says Impermium CEO Mark Risher.

Spammers have even moved into the political arena. Using bots, they have been flooding news and political sites with tens of thousands of comments – 90 percent of them trashing Mitt Romney. In many cases they are being posted by the same networks that are paid to promote online pharmacies and knockoff designer handbags, says Risher. Who’s behind the attacks? That’s unclear (though my money is on one of the Pro-Newt PACs -- just a hunch).

Not only is social spam more virulent and more profitable, the people doing it are much harder to track down than email spammers. For example, many of them operate sleeper cells by creating bogus accounts that sit dormant for months, suddenly wake up and start spewing spam, then go dark again. In one instance, Impermium discovered 30,000 dormant accounts that were activated and spewed out 475,000 spam posts in a single hour, then went back to sleep.

Ironically, as I was writing this post I got a Facebook friend request from one Jessica Ceceli, an attractive 28-year-old with whom I already have 19 friends in common. In fact, nearly all of Jessica’s friends are tech journalists of the male persuasion.