They found a hole in…
Today I noticed that I received a ton of spam to moderate for the blog. I thought… “How the heck are they getting in?”
So I made a quick change, still the spam was flowing through unabated which really shouldn’t have been possible. So started looking at the web logs closely which was a bit of a pain since everything is done with POSTS so you don’t see the details you need to figure out which “hits” are related to the SPAM. However I finally worked through it. The bastards are using trackbacks… Trackbacks are created when one blog refers to another blog. It is nice to get those interconnections so you can find related info… Plus that sucks as I like trackbacks, however, you can’t change the format used because it is all agreed upon so systems can automatically post the trackbacks.
So unfortunately I had to disable the trackbacks. Mark one point up for the spammers.
There simply has to be a way to stop this from happening. I’m going to research and find if you can stop this kind of trackback spam using some plug-in. Are you using Akismet? It seems to be doing a good job of keeping spam out of my wordpress blog.
joe,
Look at this link, very creative spam…
http://msgoodies.blogspot.com/2006/06/smart-spam.html
How will you stop, this kind…:)
Fred:
I could look at turning back on keyword blocking which is probably what akismet is doing. I have two options there, black hole the matches or moderate them. I am already moderating them and I don’t want to black hole them because someone may stumble over some of the words accidently.
Kamlesh:
Actually my spam blocking I put into place would stop that. Assuming it wasn’t done manually or that the spamming code was smart enough to send along the right field with the right value to say it isn’t spam. On trackbacks it would zip right through because it would be quite unlikely anything would block that.
Akismet is more intelligent than keyword blocking, if I remember correctly. In fact, there’s a database driving Akismet and it has caught 100% of my comment and trackback spam. Do check it out, it’s a standard part of WordPress.