Singing Potatoes
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Thursday, 29 December 2005
Attack of the Robospammers
Faces of Insanity

Certain entries in this blog of mine attract the spam like crazy. Last night, I shut off comments on the most recent target; since then, twenty-six twenty-seven separate attempts have been made to add comments to it. Every instance involves two hits, from two very different IP addresses, with no repeats; the second one attempts to post the comment.

It looks like there's something out there — a trojan or something similar — that places a victim's computer under the control of the spammers. It looks like the first hit is an attempt to ascertain that the page actually exists, and the second one is the actual comment posting. It's fiendishly clever — since they come from a wide variety of addresses, you can't simply block an IP address (or range of addresses); and since many of them come from big ISPs (comcast, adelphia, ameritech, roadrunner, etc.), blocking their address ranges would block many potential readers.

Looks like I'm going to have to rework the comment code to prevent this.


Posted by godfrey (link)
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