New Kind Of Comment Spam Targeting Wordpress

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Wordpress Comment Spam

Today I discovered a new type of attempted comment spam targeting my Wordpress blog.  The spam bot managed to figure out a section of a legitimate comment and then immitate it and then append a spam link to the end.  Technically this is quite easy to do using regex or some simple string functions once a page has been “spidered” by the spam bot.

Here is a quick example of what is going on.  The following is an origional comment that has been automatically extracted from my blog and then had spam attached to it prior to reposting…

Read the rest of this entry »

Windows SMTP Service In Windows Server 2003: Relay Spam

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

SMTP Relay Setup In SMTP Service, Windows Server 2003

When you enable the Windows SMTP service in Windows Server 2003 you might think the default options are secure enough. Think again. The SMTP service is pre-configured to operate as a relay server for spam! Yo have to configure it to not act as a spam relay server. Maybe Microsoft was targeting spammers when it designed its software. A lucrative market I guess.

Anyway if you do not want 300,000 spam emails running through your server a day from Taiwan (Hinet.net - http://hinet.net) that overload your server with an additional 2GB of traffic a day you better block a lot of IP’s and tighten your firewall and configure the SMTP service more tightly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wordpress Anti-Spam Security Tips

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Many automated web bots (bad ones that spam up blogs) may directly be able to access the Wordpress file wp-comments-post.php by sending GET or POST data to it.  If you see hits come up in your log files for the file wp-comments-post.php then you can be 100% sure that it is spam bots.  There are two tips I just came up to help stamp out this issue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fix Wordpress Databases Infected With Spam Links By Automated Hacking Bots

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Users of Wordpress 2.1 and possibly other versions have been the target of automated spam attacks - which are actually hacks against your site. The hacker has automatically targeted sites using 2.1 using a robot that exploits vulnerabilities in the wordpress code - see this page for more information:

http://gordon.dewis.ca/2008/01/06/expunging-the-wordpressnetin-spam-injection-hijack/

Read the rest of this entry »

qwyghxh A Super Drupal Spam Bot

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

I noticed a few weeks back that many of my CMS installs were being invaded by a user called “qwyghxh”.

Read the rest of this entry »