I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT’s of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe – most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are being used for comment spam? It sure looks like a “100 pcs for an hour to do your bidding” kind of thing going on… There have been literally hundreds today alone (which is the first time I’ve actually seen this heavy a spam-storm. By the way…. I haven’t yet seen one slip into the actual comments… I attribute that almost entirely to a very useful WordPress 2.x plugin…
Akismet essentially is what is keeping me from spending the next 3 hours either deleting trackbacks or cutting off trackback functionality entirely. If you use wordpress and fight with spam comments, you should definitely look into it. Looks as though the storms finally dying down again…. It’s interesting each of these waves have lasted about an hour – gambling sites earlier today too..
Comments
3 responses to “Speaking of botnets….”
[…] As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through. […]
[…] I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?) […]