February 1, 2005
trackback spam
Aaaargh… just when I had comment spam pretty much beaten, along comes TRACKBACK SPAM.
This Royally Sucks!!!
Loic, is Six Apart doing anything about it? [Six Apart is the company that makes Movable Type, my current blog software.]
[UPDATE:] Damn, just got whacked again by the “Online Poker” boys… At this rate it’ll be a couple of hundred whacks every 24 hours.
At least with MT 3.121 it’s easy to remove spam. Back when I had MT 2.65 it took forever. God, it was awful. Almost switched to another platform (and I’m a uber-loyal MT user!). Sheesh.
I just hope in the long-term, spam doesn’t become MT’s “Kryptonite Factor”.
it’s been happening on WordPress blogs for a couple of weeks now. Now cure in sight yet but I’m crossing my fingers.
Unlike Alexander made some alterations since the spam run in the beginning of January, it’s possible to block him. Check your raw logs, and I’m sure you’ll spot how.
Who is “Unlike Alexander”?
Hugh,
Same thing just happend to me, the same spammer switched from comment spam to trackback spam.
I wonder if its the same online casino hitting you. And if so, I wonder if it’s more than just coincindince that we’re both in the marketing space?
Jeff, yeah, it was the “Online Poker” guys…
Trackback spam is ugly. Basically you can’t protect from it other than content filters. That being said the content filters I’m using with wordpress have been very effective. There’s likely an equivalent for mt I just don’t know what it is…
I’ve turned off trackbacks and am relying on Technorati to find those folks linking back to me. You can use MTClose2 to close your old trackbacks.
It’s easy to hide email addresses. Just go through your templates and remove the MT author email address tags. The email will still be sent to you with the comment, but it won’t appear on your site. I did that a year ago, it’s a 10 minute project.
Between closing comments after 7 days and now closing trackbacks completely I manage to avoid 99% of the problems.
Yeah, Technorati works just as good as Trackbacks, not to mention Bloglines for RSS… you really don’t need Trackbacks, when you think about it.
Yeah, maybe turinging off trackbacks would be the ebst solution…
This link could be helpful:
http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000577trackback_spam.php
Cheers,
John
Then there’s referral spam, which only appears if you parse your logs, or display raw referrals.
See http://idunno.org/misc/referralSpammers.aspx for a list of who has hit me.
What I’ve noticed in only the past week is the learnhowtoplay.com and tecrep-inc.net spammers who set up numerous sub domains under their main sites, then hit me with all the sub domains in about an hour.
Hosted in china, so not much use in complaining. I’m just going to have to rewrite my filtering code to check wildcards.
I have got XXXXXXXXX and japanese XXXXXXX trackback spam. Apologies to those who find it before I do
I highly recommend upgrading to MT 3.15. Install Blacklist 2.0 and the NoFollow plugin. I haven’t seen anything make it past this setup on 3 of my sites since I installed it a few weeks ago. This includes Trackbacks (ping attacks) and referral spam (links in the emails). The Blacklist log shows it’s the same spam dealin’ boys you’re speaking of trying to get through daily, but no luck.
Doesn’t seem right to compare MT and the Kryptonite experience in my humble opinion. There’s information posted on MT’s site about how to fight this and they take a very proactive approach to making this the best tool available for all of us. The Nofollow plugin even created an initiative with the big guns (Google, Yahoo and MSN) to ignore links with the nofollow attribute in order to help do away with referral spam altogether.
Kryptonite ignored the situation. They kept trying to tell us all that their product was flawless even though we (the users) told them something’s wrong. They thought the problem would just go away because they pretended it didn’t exist. Instead the users went away.
MT seemed to jump on it pretty quick. I saw post after post coming through the ProNet list. They also put out a guide to fighting spam on their website — see news from January 04, 2005. Just feel the need to defend them. Their tools get me closer to where I want to be… today.
I hope you find this useful. I’m just a user, but a very happy one.
Peace.
Brian
More trackback spam.
It isn’t just me either. Hugh and Lauren Weinstein are suffering through it too. I use MTCloseComments in conjunction with MTBlacklist on MovableType to control comment spam. While MTBlacklist does an admirable job with trackbacks, I would love to be…
Yes Brian, I agree with most of what you say.
MT has been very good about comment spam… and certainly, having Jay Allen now on board their team makes me feel a whole lot better.
I suppose the main problem I have with my curent MT program is you can only ban one IP at a time. So if your friendly neighborhood spammer posts a spam with a different IP every time…
567.56.789.121
567.56.789.122
567.56.789.123
567.56.789.124
567.56.789.125…
It’s a nuisance.
That being said, if somebody wants to take away MT’s market share, all they have to do is build a better mousetrap, and it’ll be a disaster for the company.
Also, MT’s two biggest competitors are Google and Microsoft. MT doesn’t have the money to trhow at the problem like the other two.
I’m not saying MT is doing anything wrong… I’m just pointing out potetential land mines.
On my wordpress blog, it has the filters that hold certain words— when I check to see who’s posting mass spams to my blog, they always use a random IP and a random e-mail, but MORE times than not, the first initials in their fake e-mail will be the same… for instance.. there was byob@eerbs then the second part would change. So I popped byob in the filter– and it finished him.
These guys are in some sort of call center in the phillipines by the way. I actually live tracked them while they were entering my site using IPs from all over the world, but I could see exactly where their source was coming from. Dummies… So by matching the first entry into my site before the spamming hits, I can tell at least where they’re coming from. Find their key word intials that they most likely use to get paid and prove they spammed– and you’ve bested them.
Its these call center type places that are REALLY doing damage in this regard. It’s not just one guy sitting around doing it automatically.
Hugh, I understand the desire for a better mousetrap… or at least one with self-loading cheese. I can’t imagine MT not just building in Jay Allen’s Blacklist plugin from the start in the future. But for now, we’re gonna have to put the cheese in ourselves. If you need a hand let me know. God knows we get so much from you.
Hugh, thanks for the feedback. We’re keenly aware of the TrackBack and comment spam issue, and I think we’re not facing a Kryptonite issue because we’re communicating honestly and openly about it. And, to put things in perspective, we’ve got the most experienced and dedicated folks in the comment spam fight on our team, which I think makes us world-class contenders in the battle. (Most TypePad users really don’t feel they have any spam issues at all with their blogs.)
It might help to check out the post we put up about fighting TrackBack spam yesterday:
http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/2005/02/mod_security_fo.html
Or to check out our Comment Spam Guide, which is almost 25 pages. We published it last month:
http://sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam.html
I hope that addresses your concerns, and feel free to email if you’re still having problems.
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Thank God you brought this up. I’m getting the most disgusting, awful trackback spam. I use Typepad (I’m not as advanced as most of the rest of you), and I have no idea how to deal with this! Who the hell are these rude bastards?
Why am I suddenly reminded of the Jack in the Box commercial where Jack counts the days until McDonald’s start making their burgers fresh?
consider this
http://james.seng.cc/archives/2005/02/04/solution_to_trackback_spams.html
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