12 October 2007 - 21:33A new attack vector for spammers?

I was thinking about how blogs combat for spamming thru comments when I came across this idea:
There are entry barriers for comments because the user, along with a third-party, do the job of filtering comments, but as far as I know there are no entry barriers for track-backs.
A spammer could use track-backs quite efficiently because track-backs are managed usually thru third-parties (such as Technorati, Google, etc…) which will probably not be able to defend against this. These third parties will not be able to defend against this type of spam because they delegate nothing towards the blog against which they compile track-backs (at least they do not do this right now). The user should make the final decision on whether the track-back is a real track-back or spam and decide whether to display that track-back or not.

When will we have track-back spam? And what shape will take the defense against it?

Later edit: Obviously track-back spam has a much higher cost than blog comments spam so this may make it un-profitable.
On the defense side: you are essentially using a third-party service (like Technorati search) over which you don’t have much control. You could set-up a filter on your site that would filter the results that this third-party gives you.
So, it looks like track-back spam is not the way to go. Mind you, if track-back spam would have been profitable we would have had it a long time ago.