Chan's Personal Blog

The other week, I was checking my web statistics, and came across a strange anomaly, apparently I had 1800 unique visitors this month. This sounded really fake. I looked through the database, and noticed that I was using a lot more space than usual. It turns out that my blog had been hit by a crap load of comment/trackback spam. This is where some jerk decides to leave comments and trackbacks with web links that promote their website.

Leaving links helps the spammer because Google will see these links and boost the spammer's webpage rank because there's more links pointing to it. Furthermore, these spam attacks are automated by computer, so it takes no time for a spammer to do this. It's a pain in the butt because I leave my blog open for all to use, and spammers come through and take advantage of this.

The spam attack is a distributed attack which means it comes from hundreds of different computers. This is annoying because you can't pinpoint the source of all the spam, and blow away that computer. Most likely, some hacker has taken over hundreds of random computers, and have them sending out spam all the time.

In either case, I cleared out 2,000 pieces of spam from my blog, and I reprogrammed a part of my blog to prevent automated spam attacks. So far it seems to have worked. However, they seem to have stepped up their attack. Now I'm getting spam through e-mail because they're using my contact form that I have on this blog. Well played spammers. This weekend I'm going to have to do some more coding to beat the spammers.

If things get worse, I'm going to upgrade my blogging software to the latest version which sports some advanced anti-spam features. Hopefully this will keep them at bay for a while. It is a digital arms race though, sooner or later, they will break through the defenses.

Anyway, hopefully I can keep up against the spammers because I want to keep my blog open and interactive as it has been for all these years.