Back from the Google Wilderness
Some time ago, I noticed the traffic on this site dropping off rapidly.
Sequential Email Addresses are Silly
A simple hint for email administrators everywhere. If you have a large number of users with unique sequential ID numbers, it may be tempting to use that ID as a primary email address, or an alias, but don’t do it. It’s an open invitation to spammers to target your users with the minimum of effort. …
Probable Trust
Right now, there’s limited information on reputable news sites regarding the earthquake/tsunami that occurred south of Samoa yesterday. To find more, I turned to Twitter (and its open source equivalent identi.ca). Disseminating live news from witnesses, moments after a major event, is the most compelling feature of such services, but both failed me. Not in …
b0rked
Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke …
Worst Offenders for WordPress 2.5 – Pre-Alpha
I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it. As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is …
Akismet Billion
It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now.
Akismet htaccess extension
My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. Did I …
Akismet Worst Offenders Extension
This last few weeks the site has been very heavily hit by comment spammers hawking their usual reprobate websites and wasting internet bandwidth. Akismet has been doing a sterling job of catching this spam and not one message has made it onto the site (I wrote about Akismet’s effectiveness in the pre-launch testing previously). In …
Analysing MyNiceMailAt.com
I’m hoping to spend some time over the next ‘n’ weeks understanding the data generated from the mynicemailat domain, though I’m a bit busy with real experiments at the moment, so I intend to do it by thinking aloud here as I get the opportunity.
Akismet – Comment Spam Killer
This website – like any website that allows readers to submit comments – receives comment-spam, usually advertising medicines, gambling, or other vices. I’ve been trialling a new anti-comment-spam plugin since mid September. It’s called Kismet, it’s from Automattic, (hence Akismet for short) and it’s working very well.
Spammed by MyNiceMailAt .com
Hopefully I just spoiled a spammer’s whole week. How? I bought the domain that he’s trying to promote (MyNiceMailAt.com) before he did.
Spam Indirection
I think this may be a mildly new twist on email and referral spam: using referral spam to advertise a message that’s stored in an unused public newsgroup, thus avoiding spam filters.
Latest Referral Spam Domains
Referral and Comment spam continues unabated, with several new domains this week, and several new machines doing the spamming. Here I present two regularly updated URl’s that list the domains and ip addresses of the machines that are hitting me, and the two scripts that generate them.
Curious Referrals
An article on SpamHuntress.com got me thinking laterally about some of the referral stats I’m seeing, and I’ve started to notice something curious.
Comment Spam, RIP soon?
A couple of years ago, a web page with an open comment form would have been used for commenting intelligently and considerately on the subject at hand or sending a message to the page author. Then, with the advent of Google’s page rank system, comment forms became the subject of massive misuse, because pagerank gave …
Extending StatTraq and Spam Control
I spent a while chatting with StatTraq author Randy Peterman over the last few days, we’re both interested in how to remove (or hide) referral spam from site usage statistics in order that they may be a realistic and meaningful reflection of actual human visitors.
15 New Referral Spam Domains
Over the last few days the referral spam tide has ebbed and flowed: for about a week, everything that came in was pointing to doobu.com, then today, there was a definite change in tactic as 15 new poker related domains (see the existing story on referral spammers for the updated table of details) were added …
New Referral Spam Tactic?
Today I’ve stopped getting hit by named domains for referral spam. At first glance this sppears to be good news.
Another Light Analysis of Referral Spammers
The “Account Terminated” swamp got a little muddier over the last few days.
A Light Analysis of Referral Spammers
So; more tales from the “Account Terminated” swamp. I’m looking through my referrer spam from the last 24 hours and I decide to do a little whois checking.