Michael P. O'Connor

Attack of the spam bots

I turned off the trackbacks to try to stop the spam here, but they have just moved to the comments. I woke up this morning to find that I had 110 spam comments. Looking at the logs from the web server I see that was 1/4 of the spam attempts the 404’s listed in the log were for the file trackback.php and it was just insane. So I do know deleting the trackback file did cut down on my spam big time, and there were 5 times that many 403’s from pervious IP addresses I blocked for spamming as there were the 404’s.
The server I have my website on sends out more 403’s then it does the real web page, that is just sad that spammers have made the internet a hostel place to put forms on.


All of these from the same IP addrss.

[Thu Dec 15 07:53:03 2005] [error] [client 200.79.192.25] File does not exist: /home/mike35/public_html/blog/bblog/trackback.php/87/
[Thu Dec 15 07:53:03 2005] [error] [client 200.79.192.25] File does not exist: /home/mike35/public_html/blog/bblog/trackback.php/9/
[Thu Dec 15 07:53:03 2005] [error] [client 200.79.192.25] File does not exist: /home/mike35/public_html/blog/bblog/trackback.php/85/
[Thu Dec 15 07:53:03 2005] [error] [client 200.79.192.25] File does not exist: /home/mike35/public_html/blog/bblog/trackback.php/78/

The real list is much longer from this same IP address, there are about 200 entries from that IP address the time stamp starts at 07:53:01, the attacker made over 200 requests in less then 3 seconds.
If you want to see a more compleate list click here to see the last 300 error messages from my web log