5.19.06
The cat and mouse game continues
Welp, now my blog posts started getting comment spam. It was the last hold out that was never breached, until this week. But, I'm glad it happened. It really openned my eyes to how comment spammers operate.
I log traffic around this site two ways. First, I track who comes here, if/how they were referred and any searches they do while here. Second, I keep track of who's here within a 5 minute time frame. The second was more vanity than functional, until now.
Well, when the spam started, I cross checked by IP who posted it, and tracked how they moved around my site. What was noteworthly was they only had one record. At the very least, each legitimate visitor should have 2. Each visit, of course, also had a faked referrer from my site. That means, the post was submitted from a remote server, not here...and that remote server is simply running a script mimicing my comment form. The plan? Mark the post attempt as illegitimate and block it.
Using the "vanity" table tracking current visitors here, I check to see if someone trying to post has even visited the site. If not, block and list the IP as a spammer. If they try to move around the site afterwards, their block status is not updated. The block is dropped eventually, but if it's one of those spam bots that tries multiple posts each visit, I'm covered...like a jimmy hat!
There's a bit more that goes on behind the scenes, but it's a pretty neat trick that doing the trick so far.
4:50 pm in i hate spam | 1 person viewing0 ramblings so far