Recently I’ve experienced a boat-load of absolutely nonsense spam! Just random characters, pointing to random character URI’s (having checked a few, they lead no where). The name is often semi-coherent, but everything else makes absolutely no sense at all. The senders seem to be from three different IP’s.
I’m not sure what the point is; I can only guestimate that perhaps they’re testing the system for flaws or something along those lines. So far none of the comments have gotten through. If it continues I’ll add the IP’s to my blacklist and hope that settles the matter.
You as well eh? I’ve been getting these as well, even while I renamed the comments-post file. Kind of silly, but it’s no problem. Delete.
That idea for IP’s might be a bit… big. I dunno, but the IP’s are so random that I don’t dare guess they are bots on some server or are just nasty things on people’s PC’s.
It’s trying to confuse Baesian-based filters. If these comments are marked as spam, their “words” are marked as spam, so the filter learns junk. I’ve been getting the same thing by email too. One link pointing to a non-existing site, with unintelligible text.
I suppose they know what they’re doing if they want to mess up the accuracy and usefulness of our filters. :-(
Arg! Spam Karma counts 650 of them in just a little over four hours. Makes me sooo damn angry. Go the hell away you stupid fools!
Well, Bayesian scoring is just one system. A truly effective spam countermeasure combines several systems. Spam Karma combines several systems and is very good, though I had one spam comment manage to slip past it today. But the spammer made the mistake of trying to send several dozen comments per second, which caught the rest of them after the first came through.
Trying to fool a Bayesian scoring by filling it with junk won’t work. Any Bayesian system worth its salt clears old words if they haven’t been used in a long time. So their junk gets cleaned out after a while, and they’re back where they began.
Theyre evil EVIL! people these spammers, definitely a scourge of these modern interneted times
You’re not alone. Today I enabled my first spam filter.
try blogging pro’s authorization image solution. basically it’s a scrambled image displaying a code (much like yahoo). the drawback is that everyone who posts a comment, must enter yet another piece of information. still this very quickly solved my spamming problems and i really advise it.
duh sorry the link is http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2004/06/07/wordpress-hack-authimage/
Personally, I’m not a big fan of captchas or other methods that require more input than “name, email web site.” They disrupt the flow of comment writing.
That’s where Spam Karma is so great. It just sits there, invisible, and doesn’t interrupt unless it’s not certain if a comment is spam or not, and first then gives the user a captcha to answer.
im using kittens spam words and spaminator – seems to be fine atm
I wish somebody would hurt them where it hurts. A lawsuit would scare them away. Too bad nobody has the time or effort to go for it. :(
Oh well… I don’t either :).
Just got it too. It isn’t scraping the form, so Spam Karma deletes it without batting an eye.
I’m trying Spam Stopgap, a plugin by Matt Mullenweg.
I must say that it works fine on my blog.
Ahh, so that’s what’s going on! recommend Sparm Karma too, I even lowered my filtering level recently and they are still aren’t getting through.
But that also, means now that I can’t be bothered to go through the report for false positives!
I’ve been getting lots of spam (and I do mean LOTS) about internet casinos and loans. I have been adding the words to Wordpress’s spam-filter, and it’s worked out well so far.
I agree with your thoughts – someone’s probably testing a new spam system =[
I have to say that we’re a bit spoiled at Textdrive — tons of comment spam is blocked by mod_security before it even reaches the PHP files in Wordpress. On top of that there’s another Apache module that blocks an IP for 30 seconds if it does too many requests to a single file (such as a comment form) within a certain amount of time.
We have a team of elite anti-spam commandos who think up new spam-blocking rules all the time. I’m one of them.
yep, same here. got more then 150 of them. total rubbish. could it be to confuse google and put your site low in the ranks because it has loads of broken links?
I think it’s a spammer who is pissed that his stuff hasn’t been getting through all the spam filters and he is doing this out of spite to try and clog up our sites.
I use Kitten’s spam tools and have had much success with them.
This spam attack seems part of something bigger, it started the 24th in the night, more or less and it hasn’t stopped, or has it? Nice Christmas present.
I have had around 600 spam messages captured and I don’t thing it’s going to be ending anytime soon. At least Spam Karma is doing a good job.
Hmm… so it is not me alone then….
I hate those comments… I get very few a week, but yeah, one grows sick and tired of it eventually.
Kitten’s Spam Words and Spaminator are doing a good job here IMO.
Add me to the choreus of folks confused as to the point of these two-word single-link random-character spams. I mean, I can understand when some scum posts a link to a pron website (don’t like it, but understand the point). This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me…there doesn’t seem to be ANY reason to use a bunch of zombies (they almost have top be zombies, since most of the IPs I’ve seen are provider dynamics) for anything this stupid.
But it almost MUST be intentional…earlier this evening I noticed that two seperate zombies sent the exact same postings, two random-character words, first linked to a non-existant site.
Bloody weird.
Thankfully my site isn’t that popular and so I guess the amount of spam I get is more limited due to that. I haven’t had totally nonsensical spam comments yet, only ones with the word poker mainly with religious junk or random collections of URLs (oh, I have mail “A new comment on the post #5 is waiting for your approval
Author : poker (IP: 200.31.23.195 , c3123-195.impsat.com.co)”
Do’h. I have mail, increasingly this is the case but I have yet to have a flood larger than 100 messages and Blacklist catches most of them.
My keywords, IPs, and author names comment blocking list gets longer and longer as the days go by. When I finally got around to checking my mail this afternoon, I had 20 messages and 19 of them were notifications of messages waiting for approval. That is very annoying for me, but it must be an even bigger pain for the creaters of more popular websites/blogs (like yourself).
Yeah, i can currently keep spam off my site in less than 20 minutes a day. I don’t know if this is the case for everyone. I only had 27 to delete this morning!
I have been getting about 1 of these comments a day. I’m usually at my computer so I delete them immediately after I recieve them. This morning I was out, got one, then after 15 minutes, I was spammed over 180 times within 20 minutes. Thanks to the post about Spam Stopgap I just installed it, and no spam has come through.