I got hit with a flood of comment spam tonight, starting at about 7:30pm EST. I discovered it at 9:30, after I was done teaching, and spent 30 minutes entering URLs into MT-Blacklist and rebuilding. There were well over 100 spams already there.
Looking at my log, it appears they’re still trying—I show a bunch of blacklist-denied comments over the past ten minutes. I’m going to hope I got the bulk of their URLs, and am going home and going to bed. I’ll assess any new damage in the morning.
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Update: PZ Myers pointed out in the comments that Theresa Nielsen Hayden had gotten the same flood of spam, and had posted her blacklist. She also posted a link to Kip Manley’s blacklist. Both are here
I’ve imported both of their blacklists, so mine includes everything they had. Mine’s here.
As Kip says in Theresa’s comments—add these now if you have MT-Blacklist running, or you’ll end up having to despam by hand later, which is a serious pain.
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Update 2: Just checked my MT activity log. During the twelve hours since I finished updating my blacklist last night (around 10:30pmEST), there were 510 rejected comments, from 142 different IP addresses. The storm seems to have subsided for now.
Jay Allen, you’re my hero!
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Same thing is being reported on Making Light -- and she's posted her blacklist, which may help you out.
Got some nibbles last night, seemed to have blocked most of them. Here's mine.
I imagine your blacklists will be better than mine. But what I have noted is that they are hitting the same posts - and the posts that they are hitting appear to be the ones with the most links to them.
Leads me to believe that they have a list of blogs. Could even be one of our own (looks around suspiciously...)
jill walker also reports a spate of spam in comments:
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/blog_technical/damn_spam.html
and the sharing of a list of banned URLs
Now not to press Taran's paranoia too far... could it be that those lists help ranking? I.e. the spammers are really trying to get on a banned list that is shared amongst bloggers in order to boost their ranking with the search engines of the sites they advertise?
Yep got it hit quite massively too, starting on New Years Eve, probably guessing I wouldn't be watching while looking at the fireworks outside :) Been getting hit almost daily since. Time to install the MT anti-spam module and get it to work this time. Last time around something went wrong.
The same postings are hit all the time. But in my blog it's seemingly the less linked to posts that get hit.
Anyway it always starts with semi-innocent comments ("Just surfed in. Great work" that sort of stuff) and also the spam messages try to emulate real comments more and more. I had a few almost convincing comments, stuffed with links to the usual suspects.
I just turned MT-Blacklist on my blog off on the 9th because it slows down posting comments... but if I start getting spammed again I'll turn it on in a heartbeat. Eeeek. What a pain to deal with, Liz.
/me runs off to add stuff to his blacklist in case he sees the need to turn it on again.
Take a look Movable Type article:
http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004_01.shtml#000882
Movable Type released version 2.66 on Jan 14th, to improve some protection against comment flooding.
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