Spam Attack on eHow!

eHow is currently undergoing an attack of spammers in the comments area of most articles. The messages says, "hey. thought you should see this. make money from google! go here: " and then includes an url which looks like it goes to a site to make money on Google.

DO NOT CLICK ON THE URL IN THESE SPAM COMMENTS!

It's a hijack site, and may infect your computer with malware (anything from spyware that tries to get your passwords, to worms that use your computer to spread more spam across the internet). NEW NOTE: The specific virus this site spreads (that we know about) is Artemis. An eHow member thoughtfully wrote an article about dealing with Artemis of you clicked on the site.

What should you do if your articles have such comments on them? For right now, I think we should leave it be. When it started a bunch of us were flagging and reporting abuse - so it has been reported to eHow - but this is clearly an organized high power attack. They may even be intending to bring down eHow with too much activity, and our activity could make the situation worse.

If this is a "denial of service" attack, it isn't working yet. They are only clogging the comment system. The site has not slowed down and readers can still find our articles and ads are still posted on them.

It is possible that eHow's staff is already working on it, but it is also possible that they are mostly on vacation today and may not get to this until tomorrow. (That's why these attacks tend to come on a weekend.) Let's give them some time to fix it, and not overload the site ourselves too much.