Spammers Turning to Kindle Books
Written by Sue Walsh on June 21, 2011
There’s an interesting article in the Atlantic about how spammers have turned to a new medium – eBooks. Specifically, Kindle books. The way Amazon’s Kindle platform works, anyone can publish an ebook absolutely free. This, along with the Kindle’s huge growth in popularity, has led spammers to the site. A flood of spam book has been hitting the site and each one has a similar MO. The price is usually around 99 cents and the topics are how-tos for popular subjects like home improvement and gardening. However once the customer buys the book and downloads it to their Kindle or Kindle app, they discover it’s basically one long app for something called “Niche Content Kit”. The ad even goes so far as to invite the reader to create their own fake eBook using the same exact material they just downloaded! Another kind of spam book scrapes public domain content and puts a pretty cover on it. These books are then sold as if they were new – the fact that the reader can get the same material for free is hidden.
It’s not really surprising that spammers have turned to Kindle eBooks. Where just a few years ago there were only a couple of hundred thousand eBooks published, last year there was nearly 3 million. The audience for them has exploded and it’s only natural that spammers will gravitate to where the largest audiences are. First it was blogs, then social media, now eBooks. Businesses and spam filtering software will have to make sure they are up to the challenge.
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Amazon will surely implement some kind of reporting/refunding system for these “books.” It would be like if you bought a box of crackers at the store and opened it up to find a bunch of newspapers or something to make the box feel heavy.
You could guess something like this was going to happen based on how easy it is to publish for the platform, however.
Well, It’s not really surprising at all.
Many spammers are looking for vulnerable, massive-reach, and “it” medium – and Kindle is known for this. Amazon was warned by many security experts about this a few months ago.
Although the Kindle runs on Linux Linux 2.6, it’s still susceptible to all types of spams.