Attack of the spambots
This morning I got up, made my coffee, and sat down to the computer as usual, expecting to open email and get to work. Lo and behold, instead of the 20-40 emails I usually have in my box, there were closer to 170. Almost all comment spams.
Now I run Bad Behavior, which usually does a stellar job of keeping the cruft off my site. But this was something bizarre. And as I was trying to moderate comments to get rid of them MORE WERE COMING IN! I counted over 40 in less than a minute. Every time I’d purge, it would return me to a screen with more to moderate. GAARRGGHHH!!!!!
Steve at ControlCongress.com had a similar attack happen recently. It’s easy to see why he was concerned.
Well, I stopped the attack. How? It took me three tries to get it activated since I was still getting hammered, and the functions were either timing out or 500 erroring, but I finally got the Comment Timeout Plugin installed, which shut off the commenting on the older posts that the bots were hitting. And it stopped. Completely.
Now, the next step will be to see if legitimate commenters can come through. Please do drop a note and let me know. I got through fine in a test comment. My contact forms seem to still be working as well. Thank the Big Kahuna. Otherwise my income would be greatly curtailed!
I’ve dropped a line to Michael at Bad Behavior, hoping he can look into this latest incursion, since it was truly awful. I hope this post helps some of you who might experience the same thing, an event I wouldn’t wish on my next to worse enemy. Though I wouldn’t mind if it happened to the thousands of splogs out there . . .
Technorati Tags: comment spam, spambots, bad behavior plugin, comment timeout plugin
March 9th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Im not cool enough to get automated attacks yet so I didnt see any rise at this time. But at least you got them stopped!
Dave
March 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
You will. Especially since I linked to you. The spambots find all my clients, which is the downside of me passing on my googly goodness.
And I just heard from Michael Hampton. He’s in the middle of a move, so there’s no immediate relief in sight.
At least you just proved the legitimate commenters can get through. I hope. Some of them at least. Maybe.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Oh yes…. let’s hope they get the splogs with this! Truly a brilliant thought, wish I’d been the one to come up with it!
Then again, I haven’t got hit (because either I’m too far west for it to have migrated this far yet; or more likely simply because I’m not “big” enough to offer them anything….) so I haven’t had the impetus to come up with a great punishment….
[Last time I looked, I was a legit commenter. We'll see....]