I just deleted my 30,000th comment spam. I have no idea how high the count would have been had I not put into place several techniques that automatically block bad commenters. Those that fall into my traps don’t even get entered into the Akismet system, and so aren’t counted. (Addendum 9:32pm: The count is now […]
Archive of posts filed under the Spam category.
Huge New Spam Run Starting Up
While checking my logs from overnight, I saw a huge increase in the amount of spam attempts coming in. Generally I have between 50 and 100 spam attempts per hour coming in. Yesterday, the number started increasing, and is currently running at around 3,000 rejected attempts per hour. Here’s the chart of the number of […]
“Guess who’s searching for you?” style spam is back
A few years ago, there was some spam scam outfit that would send out emails proclaiming “An individual at our website at our website is looking for information regarding: (your email address)” You’d go to the site, pay some money, and find out they really didn’t have any info about you. I received a spam […]
Frontbridge’s 88.blacklist.zap
One of my clients complained to me that some of their email wasn’t being delivered. I investigated and discovered that email to them through my server was being bounced. The error message in the maillog was: Feb 25 10:44:59 server1 postfix/smtp[607]: 852EA400001: to=, relay=mail.global.bigfish.com[216.32.180.22], delay=2, status=bounced (host mail.global.bigfish.com[216.32.180.22] said: 550 Service unavailable; Client host [64.34.170.90] […]
Akismet Misses “Paris Hilton Sex Tapes” Comment Spam
As much as I love using Akismet for getting rid of comment spam on my blogs, it is extremely frustrating that for some oddball reason, Akismet rarely catches spam that discusses Paris Hilton’s sex antics. I dutifully tag them as spam, but for whatever reason, Akismet won’t learn that Ms. Hilton’s shenanigans aren’t a real […]
Extra Fields in Trackback Spam
One of my blogs just caught a spammer from 69.31.80.66 trying to submit trackbacks to the blog, with extra fields in the “Name” field. Gen Drebery’,’deber@gmail.com’,”,’63.2.12.45′,’2008-01-25 13:43:30′,’2008-01-25 13:43:30′,”,’0′,’Internet Explorer’,’comment’,’0′,’0′),(’0′, ”, ”, ”, ”, ‘2008-01-26 13:43:30′, ‘2008-01-26 13:43:30′, ”, ’spam’, ”, ‘comment’, ‘0′,’0′ ) /* The web server logs showed he was trying to hit a […]
New Splogger Tactic: Random Sentences
While going through my comment spam this morning, I have discovered a new trick the sploggers are using. Until this week, they would scrape the first paragraph and then (usually) link to the original post on my site. It seems they are now choosing a few random sentences to excerpt. One of the sploggers chose […]
Jack-O-Lantern User Agent Considered Harmful
While researching some of the spam comments submitted to blog, I ran across the Jack-O-Lantern user agent. Any comments submitted from my blog are run through a unique WordPress comment post script I wrote. The script allows me to track who is spidering my site and storing the comment form URL for later usage. One […]
Shelfari.com Spam
The latest attempt to get into people’s webmail accounts is from a group Shelfari. Apparently set up as a service to help your friends learn about new books to read. They do this by getting you to give them your webmail account’s password so they can look to see if any of your friends are […]
Comment Spam Increase This Week
Has anyone else noticed a large increase in the amount of comment spam that Akismet is missing this week? I’ve tagged and deleted more comment spam in the past week than I have in the past 6 months. I would guess across all of my WordPress sites, I’m manually tagging 10 messages a day. That […]