2990 Blocked Hits

Periodically, giant waves of comment spam or log-in attempts with incorrect credentials hit this blog. I have my own emergency services that take care of most of them. Those that get through need special treatment: outright blocking of a single IP address or whole blocks of IP addresses. Recently, the IP address 188.143.234.155 has been the source of such attacks. After blocking it, my...

New Twist

Oh comment spam! My spam blocker detected and quarantined roughly 80,000 pieces of comment spam over the past 12 months. Before deleting the messages, I usually take a quick look to make sure that no legitimate piece was blocked by mistake. Usually there aren’t any. What I noticed was that there have been content trends. For a while, almost all spam was written in the Cyrillic...

sə-ˈri-lik

In the past months, my filter software caught 33,000 spam comments (I wish they all would have been interested readers). Of all the comment spam, 99% (if not more) is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. I’m just saying.