Comment Spammers Suck

I’m currently being hit by some sort of Zombie swarm averaging 20-30 posts a day. They are all coming from different IP’s and trickle in at different times. There are maybe 5-6 different patterns that repeat over and over again, simply with different keywords. Here are some of the most common ones:

Markus…

It was quite useful reading, found some interesting details about this topic. Thanks…

love me…

I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

wiki wiki…

Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes. Adrianne Curry….

Do you recognize these? Most of them don’t even have any significant spam payload in them. I’m guessing half of this stuff is just a training barrage trying to sneak past the filters.

What worries me is that somehow most of their posts clear my CAPTCHA without any problems. So far, 99% gets killed by AKISMET but in the last few days 3 or 4 comments slipped through. They got stuck in the moderation queue though, and I was able to classify them as spam.

Still this is a little disconcerting. So I’m trying out a new thing: a plugin called Bad Behavior. It is supposed o automatically profile and block known spambot activity. Let’s see how that pans out.

If you experience any issues posting comments, please shoot me a short email. My contact info is on the Contact Me page.

Update 12/15/2006 06:45:53 PM

3+ hours since installation, and I already had 40+ spam attempts blocked, and my Akismet queue is uncharacteristically empty. Nice! Let’s hope this plugin won’t affect regular users.

[tags]spam, comment spam, comments, blog comments, akismet, plugins, bad behavior[/tags]

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12 Responses to Comment Spammers Suck

  1. hdw UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I had about +400 spam trackbacks last week. None got, but it was a significant upsurge in attempts. It does look like someone might be trying something new. At least in my case, it’s not working yet, but they’re trying.

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  2. Jenn UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    The funniest thing about spam comments, is that it’s not even doing a good advertising job. I got a spam comment (I caught it in moderating queue) that just said, with no hyperlinks, “BUY VIAGRA.” Okay, sure dude. I’ll buy Viagra. Is that how they think people work??

    Please tell me that’s not how people work…

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  3. hdw UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Some of the spam comments I get are bizarre. Just lists of strange terms and weird links. I can’t see how they can possibly do anything good.

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  4. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    My theory is that these scripts running on infected zombies churn out gibberish by default. Unless you provide them with advertising payload they simply spam garbage.

    Either that or they use the garbage spams for calibration and tuning of the scripts. You randomly spam pages with a unique set of keywords, and then screen scrape for these keywords. If anything slips through, you do a thorough attack crawling through the links and injecting the payload into every comment…

    But I’m just guessing here. There might be another reason.

    Anyways, I’m close to a 100 blocked bots and it’s only around 6 hours since installation. Heh…

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  5. mrjones GERMANY Opera Windows says:

    you could probably let a script check if a comment is exactly posted twice or more times. so u can delete it……

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  6. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    WordPress already does that. It blocks duplicate posts made within very short time.

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  7. Rub3X UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Lmao, I wish I only got 20-30 a day. Askimet fails about 1/1000 times for me. Pretty effective. last time it failed, it took me a few times of re-reading it to make sure it was spam. It was so relevant to the topic at hand it was amazing. It just got dead on lucky with its comment lol.

    PS BUY VIAGRA FOR 10% OFF!11!! ####[###URL=VIAGRA.COM]

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  8. Matt` UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    A message board I frequent has been bombarded with spam recently, a lot for what they say is definitely celebrity porno (e.g. “Britney Spears brutally fucked”) regular porno, various drugs or just other random companies.

    After much discussion of how to deal with it (mainly involving making more people moderators so that theres more eyes looking for spam and removing it) the admin finally added an email verification to the signup process.

    I had assumed that was already in place but apparently not :roll

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  9. Matt` UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    turns out the rolling eyes smiley doesnt work here, everyone mentally replace the “:roll” in my previous post with a little yellow dude rolling his eyes

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  10. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Matt – you need to put two colons on the roll emoticon – one in front, and one in the back like so: :roll:

    Email registration may work for forums, but it is annoying. I random people who just stumble upon my blog be able to post a comment. I personally hate when blogs require registration. It is usually to much effort, especially if all I want to post is 3 lines agreeing or disagreeing with the post…

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  11. Matt` UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    I meant I had assumed it was already in place on the forum, not assumed it was in place here

    hmm.. now I think about it more, what you said could fit with you getting that. Meh, its late and I’m confused, anyway i agree that registration on blogs is annoying but for forums its virtually essential to fend off the waves of spam.

    and muchos gracias for the eye-roll guy tip
    :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:  :roll: :roll: :lol:

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  12. Josef UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Yea, comment spammers suck, I feel for you.

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