I’ve been on a blogging sabatical for the past 6 weeks, as I’ve just been too busy between work and home to keep up with my usual online time, be it reading, posting to this blog, or spare-time coding. I’ve been trying to check my email daily, to keep an eye open for comments to the blog, especial comment spam. I usually have to clean up a piece or two once a week, which takes about a minute to remove, and a minute to IP ban the poster. No big deal; just the unfortunate price of having a blog these days.<\/p>\n
Today I had the rare treat of feeling like an A-list blogger. Not because of site traffic or inbound links, but because of blog spam. I had 50 spam comments posted to this site today – that’s an average of about 1 for every 3 posts on the whole site. I can’t tell you how special I feel.<\/p>\n
For now, I have disabled both the posting and viewing of all comments on this site until I’ve had a chance to clean up the mess. This is one case where Blosxom’s simplicity works against me. Each story’s comments are stored in a separate file, in a directory structure that mirrors the category hierarchy of the site. So to clean up the mess, I’ll need to download the whole comments tree, check each file, and re-upload it.<\/p>\n
Before I put anything back online, I intend to review the list of IPs involved, which I have not done yet (I wanted to shut things down before they got worse). I do log the IP address for every comment posted, but I also want to take a look at my server log. Unfortunately, I can only view a portion of it via my host’s web interface, and I won’t be able to download a tarball of today’s log until tommorow. I suspect that there will be a number or IP addresses involved, suggesting a coordinated attack, quite possibly using compromised machines. If you aren’t running a virus package and a malware filter (such as Adaware), just do the rest of us a favor and unplug your computer from the web right now. Go on, do it.<\/p>\n
To those of you still online, who don’t post spam to this site, sorry for the rant and the partial down-time. To those of you who post spam to this site or others, [list of violent suggestions omitted – some of us actually have principles]. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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