I was messing about with IrishBlogs the other week and I didn’t get round to setting up a “proper” backend, so it was quite “open” to attack.
The amount of comment spam that the blog has attracted in its short lifespan is truly impressive, though obviously for all the wrong reasons.
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
Ouch!
It would be interesting to see how the comment spammers detect blogs. But the automated nature (one attack Is saw apparently came from a server net) of some of these comment spammers allow for some very effective safeguards.
John – I have no idea. The blog site hasn’t been “announced” anywhere, so I don’t see how they could have found it unless they are checking actively for certain files.
At least some of the spammers are watching technorati – most blogs ping technorati…
Tom’s theory is probably correct. The site is offline at the moment, so they won’t get too far for the next couple of days 🙂
If the blog is not actively pinging then it is probably a joe-job technique Michele,
The domain name has ‘blog’ as part of it. Perhaps some spammer has blog as a keyword search on some of the domain name sites. For .com alone, that would return about 32K domains.
Wordpress is automagically configured to ping pinogmatic.com which in turn hits most of the other servers and Irishblog is a tag on technorati.com so Tom’s point is perhaps more valid. A spammer with a keyword search for irishblog would probably result in a hit if technorati had been pinged.
Check the db on it as they often enter comments by article no. often for articles which have yet to be written, so when the article is written, spam magically appears immediately!
On my own site, I have turned off all spam plugins! I have a good blacklist and a couple of relevant lines in my .htaccess and this has been working for me for the last couple of weeks!