As Sophos notes on its blog, a barrage of spam links are hitting the music-themed social network. Many of these links are to offers promising free iPad, iPhone or iPod touch devices.
Apple released iTunes 10 and iTunes Ping earlier this week and the rollout has been a little bit rocky. Beyond the latest spam attacks, issues with Facebook Connect, international access issues and unclear policies for musicians have plagued the service.
These messages, which you can see in the screenshot below, are showing up in comments to posts from iTunes Featured Artists or in responses to posts from other users who make their content accessible to anyone.
Online spam is perhaps the annoyance that unifies us all. No matter how big a company or network or blog is (or small), the spammers will come.
What's curious is that it doesn't appear that Apple has any spam safe-guards in place. While it's true that iTunes Ping has a approval process for all profile photos used with Ping (presumably to prevent nude or other NSFW photos from showing up), the real-time nature of Ping prevents that sort of scrutiny for comments on posts.
Real time is actually pretty new for Apple. Users have long been able to leave reviews for music, movies and applications using iTunes, but like the profile photos in Ping, these reviews are held for review before publishing.
Still, it appears as though Apple did anticipate the problem, at least in part. On any post on your wall, there is a "Report" button next to "Like." That button lets users report content for lots of reasons, including spam. Clearly Apple anticipated people using the post feature to spam friends or followers.
What isn't an option, however, is the ability to report individual replies to those posts as spam.
A simple starter solution would be to reject any comments that contain "http://" or "www." in the text box. Comments are not hyperlinked so this would stave off some of the automated spam that seems to be showing up right now.