Has anybody else noticed a sharp increase in blog spam activity lately over the past couple of weeks? The number of firewall rules on my system generated by SpamValve was down below 40 not too long ago, but now it’s back up to over 100 again. The worst of the attacks still cause some brief hiccups on my server from time to time, but now that I’ve got a good set of automated countermeasures in place, I typically don’t notice it until after the fact.
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14 Comments
Yep, it’s up. Sharply up on one of my blogs. Virtually nothing on the other (heh, not surprising).
I’ve seen some new spammers recently. And some rebranded old ones. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s what, too.
I’m getting between 50 and 100 a day, all caught by SK2. For me, that’s actually down from what I was getting earlier in the year, which at one point reached a thousand in one day.
Definitely much more spam coming through. I am somewhat surprised to see Spam Karma generate a digest email every night!
Yup, and it isn’t just blog spam
Yeah, I’ve noticed it, too. Where it’s worst on my site is in trackback pings and in what I refer to ass “stats spam,” or referrer spam. Makes me nuts. I’m redirecting all the referrer spammers to the FBI’s internet abuse page.
My anti-comment spam measures seem to have eliminated that, and I’m using plugins to direct trackbacks and pings into the moderation queue, which is where I’m getting plenty of spam from.
The Friday before Memorial Weekend, I had 144 spams caught by SK2. Starting that night and up until about four days ago, that number jumped up to 7436. At one point, I was getting over 300 an hour.
I activated Bad Behavior and after a brief trickle of about fifty more, they’ve stopped.
Paula, thanks for the mention. Spam is definitely up; I’ve been under a referrer spam attack for almost four days now. Some of the sites where I monitor this sort of thing have reported a tenfold increase in spam, and Bad Behavior has so far made the rise in spam attacks virtually unnoticeable. Unless you’re actually looking for it. But who wants spam?
Yes, huge increase in spam over last two weeks, from twenty a day to many hundreds.
No increase of spam over here.
But then, nobody reads this blog anyway.
I’ve gotten my first trackback and comment spams the past couple of weeks. I switched to WP from blogger in March.
I’ve recently experienced recieving comments from spoofed WP blogs. Specifically, I got a comment that was more or less topic related so my filters let it through. Following the commenter’s URL, I foundd a WP install with a few posts that were more or less copy and pastes from news sites and tons of spam related links and pop-ups. I’ll refrain from specifics because I don’t want to get booted by any filter you might have, but think of the top 10 offending keywords and you’ll have a good idea of what this page was loaded with.
Looks like the nofollow attribute isn’t deterring spammers. I’ve been relatively lucky with my blog, maybe because of the lack of backlinks to mine (unsure). I feel sorry for you guys that are getting hit hard.
Just set up my blog and am not looking forward to the possibility of spam.
As prevention is better than cure, any advice on what i should do?
3 Trackbacks
Spam on the rise again? Has anybody else noticed a sharp increase in blog spam activity lately over the past couple of weeks? The number of firewall rules on my system generated by SpamValve was down below 40 not too long ago, but now it
likely that this is what happened here. As the majority of spam would probably be driven by scripts, then it may have just been the case that a spammer decided that this week is a good time to run his bot and piss on the world. Update: It seems that other people have noticed that spam traffic is on the increase. This would probably also explain the flood of spam. Comment spam is highly dependent on quantity. The minute a piece of spam gets through, the script would be likely to make the use of this vulnerable time and
[...] 6/17/2005 Spam on the rise again? Filed under: Blogs, This Site, Comment Spam, Spam, SpamValve — Dougal @ 11:48 am [...]