Yep, I've been way too busy to blog over the last couple of ... months, actually. Fortunately, the spammers haven't invented any new tricks recently and so all I have to do are the occasional manual updates to our blacklists.
One trackback spammer, though, puzzles me. He's spamming for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yes, I do mean google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com - no dirty redirects or anything, just the plain base domains. Odd.
There was an earlier spam run like this a few weeks ago and I just now got another couple of those. It's obviously the same spammer. The content is some lame compliment ("this is very good") and a link to one of the above search engines behind the text "this is related article".
After the earlier wave of these trackbacks died down, I expected them to be followed by real spam, but that hasn't happened yet.
The only problem with this spam is that it's hard to filter since, obviously, I don't want to block posts linking to Google etc. And it's using varying IP addresses from all over the place (mostly Comcast and other US-based ISPs in today's batch).
One of the trackbacks was actually caught by LinkSleeve, so I guess other sites are seeing those, too. Yet I only got them on the one site where I currently don't run Bad Behavior. And the headers of that one trackback look pretty broken. So, I gave in, installed Bad Behavior, and hope for the best ...
[Update, less than an hour later] Didn't help, at least not completely. Bad Behavior caught a few of those, but some others went through. Plus we just got one on geeklog.net, too. On a German-speaking site, adding the two sentences to the blacklist is not a problem. On an English site, however ...
Comments (0)
Damn Spam!
http://spam.tinyweb.net/article.php/trackback-spam-test-run