Today, for no particular reason, I got attacked by spammers in an unprecedented magnitude. It was not old school e-mail spam – that has been quite stabile the last years on about 100 spam mails per day. No, it was all other kinds of spam.

Comment spam

First of all, my server log has been busy logging 4 times as many comment spam attacks as usual. I normally have about 20 comment spam attacks per day, but today it was almost 80 (and today isn’t over yet). All of them failed to actually post a comment because they tried to make an invalid postback. That is the error message I get from comment spam attacks.

Trackback spam

Normally, I don’t get much trackback spam - maybe a few per day, tops. Today I received 22 which is a record for one day. None of them got through because I check for various conditions about each request and they all failed that check. Strangely enough, there have been no pingback attacks today.

Referrer spam

This is a very annoying way of spamming. I have a referrer log and every time a visitor enters my website with a referrer in the request headers, that request get’s logged so I can see where my visitors come from. Spam bots know this and send requests with fake referrer headers so that I might follow one of those referrer URLs to check it out. It’s pretty obvious most of the time that xxxgallery.com and cheap-mortage.tk is referrer spam. I do have a mechanism to filter them out. It’s very effective, but it also produces some false negatives. I can live with it.

Conclusion

It seems the annual let’s-spam-blogs-day is today and all spammers join forces and fire away. Spammers are people too and it’s nice to see that they can work together and combine various different spam techniques for optimum reach. I’m just glad that all their attempts to pollute my site were futile. Not a single spam attempt got through, just to my logs. It’s actually a good thing because for the first time I got a change to test my spam defences properly. It would have been nice if they would have invited a spammer who could do pingback spam as well. I guess you can’t win them all. Maybe they will invite him for the next annual let’s-spam-blogs-day.

I wonder if this is related to the International Talk Like A Pirate Day which is today. 

Comments

Josh Stodola

Aarrrr! Avast, ye have been founded by the enemy, m'boy! Gather ye strength, matey, spammers shall walk the plank before the sunny sun sets. Aaarrrr!

Josh Stodola

Donn Felker

I feel you on this one. I rarely get spam on the blog, but as of the last few days I've been getting hammered with trackback spam.

Donn Felker

Comments are closed