Janne Ahlberg has identified a number of names used to register spam domains

Jul 6, 2013 10:16 GMT  ·  By

Over the past weeks, a massive spam campaign designed to advertise shady diets has been making the rounds on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook.

Security expert Janne Ahlberg has been closely monitoring the operation. Currently, he’s trying to track down the spammers that run the campaign.

“I know it is not easy to identify spammers. But they do leave some traces: when you register a domain, you must use a valid e-mail address. Unfortunately it is not difficult to register a domain using name like ‘John Doe’. E-mail address does not necessarily reveal the identity of the person,” he noted in a blog post.

Previously, the expert identified one of the names used to register the diet spam domains. However, now he has found a few more, other than Edward Johnson.

The names Josh Green ([email protected]) and Kyle Ferguson ([email protected]) have also been used to register domains related to the spam campaign.

Ahlberg has also found that many of the websites registered for the spam run are hosted by Linode.

One of the most interesting domains analyzed by the expert is “referer.be,” a redirect service which apparently has some hidden features.

“For example, referer.be/2/ redirects togarciniacambogiaselect.com. referer.be/3/ seems to be broken: it stops at hcatracker.com – site owned by HitCPA, ‘an Highly Exclusive Network’. This tells about one possible business model: pay per click advertising,” the expert said.

“It seems diet spammers are also into ‘make money online / from home’ – kind of schemes. Referer.be/2/ leads to a non-diet related spam site,” he added.

Ahlberg has told Softpedia that referer.be appears to have some other hidden features which he’s still analyzing.

For additional details on the spammers check out Janne Ahlberg’s blog.