spam and trackback attack

I had just installed trenscanspammers plugin last month and thought I could sigh in relief from the spammers. Like everyone else here I’ve gotten hammered this morning both in comments and for the first time in trackbacks. Arrrggggghhhh.

Unlike the spammers I don’t get payed to keep coming up with new and clever ways of obfuscating my comment and trackback pages.

I still think someone should hunt these bastards down and sue the companies that hire them for advertising on our sites without permission.

They’ve definitely stepped up the attacks on WP blogs in the last couple days. I’m using Spam Karma, and it has caught something like 2000 comment spams since Sunday. But it didn’t catch a single trackback spam (400 of them). That’s fine, I don’t really need trackback/pingback at the moment, as I only get about 1 valid one a month. So I just disabled it for all posts. Does Kitten’s Spaminator pick up trackback spam? If so, then I may decide to switch. Oh wait, looks like Spam Karma has been updated to check trackbacks too

Oh, and if you read the interview with the comment spammer at the register, the dude says that most of them aren’t hired out – they spam to their own sites, which are themselves affiliates for the various pill, porn, and casino sites. They get some cut for every referral that comes from their own site.

i use the wpblacklist plugin which is working pretty well for comments but i just got a bunch of trackback spam, which apparently doesn’t go through wpblacklist.

is there a way to get wpblacklist to scan trackbacks?

Man 200 + trackbacks. Temporarily disabled trackbacks. Looking into Spam Karma (having issues) and Spaminators. Any preferences?

I’m getting slammed this morning, too…all for online poker. Must be our day.

well i just dl kittemspaminator as podz said ..was real easy to install ..and it seems to be working though tonights attack will tell….

antifues ..yep thats what this/these dudes are doing ..thats why u dont see an affiliate # in their code from ur blog ..the destsitations sites the payors claim they dont know who they are ..but they are full it cuz they have to pay these puke magots.. and need a real name and address to send checks (whether paypal or direct deposit)

allyn ..mayb its ur words in ur blacklist ..cuz mine stopped the trackbacks from being posted ..i blacklist the urls and common words within the url and comment ..seems to work pretty good ..i only get a couple legit comments that need to be approved because if it ..but would rather they waited than to have to hunt down spam comments..

Thanks, Logik. FOr some reason the wording “Invert Checkboxes” didn’t register with me as a “select all” option. Thanks, though – that’s a major time saver for me.

antifuse: I got about 250 over the last 2 days, about 1/5 of which trackback spam. Spam Karma caught them all, though. Yay! Do you have the very latest version of SK and trackback filtering enabled?

I downloaded the last version of spam karma this afternoon, and since then haven’t had any trackback spam.

Same here. Downloaded spam karma this morning and, after deleting the 500+ trackbacks from overnight, fortuantely, I haven’t had new stuff come through.

I wish there were a way to overload the spammers, however. After all, they’re trying to take advantage of our bandwidth (trust me, I realize that would be no solution, in fact, some would consider it cyber t&rrorism, but just the thought of THEM being charged for excessive bandwidth made me smile for a minute.)

Can someone tell me for certain whether Spam Karma handles the trackback spam or not? I’ve read the Spam Karma stuff and can’t see if it does or not. Getting killed with trackback spam like everyone else. urgh.

Yes, Spam Karma does block trackback spam, as long as it meets the criteria which you set.

https://www.unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

FYI: I’ve been sending notifications to the more prominent sites I’ve tracked the attacks back to and I got one response back. Apparently the spam was coming from one of their McAfee AV Servers that was compromised. I did not get the details of how but this illustrates how sophisticated they are starting to get. More than likely they got some kind of Malware/Trojan on their machine that was acting as a Zombie for the spammers.

I’ve begun to profile the sites to see if I can find some correlation. I’ve also got some form mail setup to send responses to the ISP in an effort to let them know that this is happening. In the case of businesses like the one mentioned above, it is handy to have another set of eyes.