Spam SPAM spam Spam « Broken Toys

16Apr/07Off

Spam SPAM spam Spam

Getting hit by a spambot that's getting past most of the site filters. Again.

My Akismet filter (the spam filter built into wordpress) catches ~ 3000 spam comments a day. It misses about 50-100 a day. So, in other words, spambots are leaving a good 25 to 30 times as many comments as, you know, actual readers. I love the Internet. no, really, I *love* the Internet. Especially this guy, who decided the most reasonable solution to ending blogspam is for every blogger to write their own commenting software.

So the site security is going up to Defcon Orange. You may see some wackiness.

Filed under: Stupidity, _ Comments Off

Comments (13) Trackbacks (1) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Ken Sykora
April 16th, 2007 - 11:22

Why don’t you just add in one of those image dealies where you have to type what you see in the picture in order to post? Shouldn’t that block 99% of them or have the bots gotten smart enough to read those images now?
scottj
April 16th, 2007 - 11:24

As told in the links above, yes, Skynet has adapted.
Ken Sykora
April 16th, 2007 - 11:32

Also, very nice goatse picture there on the pwntcha site (You have to scroll down a bit)
Amber
April 16th, 2007 - 11:36

someone please buy that poor man a new keyboard. his shift key is obviously broken which makes reading his article very tedious.
Freakazoid
April 16th, 2007 - 12:04

Two of those 3000 caught were probably my attempts to post in a previous topic a few days ago. I probably referenced too many encyclopedias or something.

btw, did that guy think it was necessary to put goatse in his list of captcha examples? That’s so several years ago.
Vasagi
April 16th, 2007 - 14:40

Goatse may be old news … but the scars are forever.
Moorgard
April 16th, 2007 - 14:59

g3t ch3@p vi@gr@ n0w!!1! http://www.lumviagra.com
D-0ne
April 16th, 2007 - 15:03

Pivot works and blocks all automatted spam. I love it.

PS. Five things you didn’t know about me is up… What’s that three months and two weeks late?
LanTheWarder
April 16th, 2007 - 18:30

It’s actually quite annoying how bad spam in every regard has gotten. I really wish I could find the 1% of people that these types of advertising actually work on and smack them in the face hard.
casey chesnut
April 16th, 2007 - 19:21

put it in context. my blog audience is primarily developers … who have the ability to write/customize their own commenting engines. instead, most people just use one of the standard packages, which provides a very targeted surface area for comment spammers to attack.
Jeff Freeman
April 17th, 2007 - 00:05

Are you using wordpress? I am working on a solution to filter bots and some people, but I don’t get enough hits, comments, or spam to really justify such a drastic solution, apart from it being really funny.

Currently just a hack to cryptographp, but I’ll keep at it ’til I’ve covered all the bases.
Dellaster
April 17th, 2007 - 00:18

I suggest you look into Asirra from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/

My spam has dropped to zero, nothing for Akismet to catch. But then, I only averaged 4-5 spam per day (with occasional floods of more). YMMV, but it looks solid. It’ll also help find homes for dogs and cats.
naum
April 21st, 2007 - 03:25

CAPTCHA definitely can be foiled. However, tilt, position and background definitely make it a tougher task… …I get hit with a ton of spam on my blog, but very very little of it gets by. If I turned CAPTCHA off (which I did recently, inadvertantly during a server swap where I didn’t have GD library installed, and suddenly, I was innundated with 100+ spam comments an hour!). Once in a while, one breaks through, and they end up IP blocked.

Of course, I think I have all of Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Turkey IP blocks blocked now too…