Daily Archives: Thursday, 20101230

rants, spam

spam, AGAIN…

so i just thought i’d put it out there… since, apparently, some people just won’t take a hint…

every spam comment that is submitted to my blog is marked as spam (which is why it doesn’t immediately appear as a comment: for that, i have to approve your comment, which won’t happen if it’s spam) and shuttled off to a “spam” folder, where i get to take it apart, dissect it, and add any domain names, IP addresses and specific key words to my blacklist and my anti-spam plugin, so that any further spam which contains ANY of the previously mentioned items will also be marked as spam.

in other words, any message that I DON’T LIKE will be dissected and any domain names, IP addresses and any key words that i find therein, will be added to my blacklist,
GUARANTEED!

i currently have almost 300 IP addresses (blocked at the /16 or /24 level), and almost 600 domain names blacklisted, and EVERY SINGLE SPAM COMMENT that gets submitted to my blog just makes the possibility that you will be able to post a comment on my blog that much less likely…

just give it up, already… go and bother someone else, why don’t you? 😐

geek stuff, malfunctioning computers

grump…

i discovered that there’s a new wordpress hack that’s cropping up on sites that haven’t been upgraded, but there’s also a nifty exploit scanner that makes tracking down wordpress hacks a lot easier.

i upgraded to 3.0.4 a couple of days ago (when it came out), so i wasn’t caught by the most recent hack, but when i ran exploit scanner it found a whole bunch of residue from the last time i was hacked which i had missed when i was cleaning up. it probably didn’t do anything any longer, because i deleted the files that contained the code that the hack was referring to a long time ago, but i’m glad i got the rest of the stuff out of there, because if i had come across it again, randomly, it would definitely have freaked me out…

exploit scanner is actually good enough at what it does that it finds things in my blog that aren’t exploits, like my anti-spam plugin (which uses the same code that they use in hacks to obscure the form field that you’re not supposed to fill out, but the one that spam-bots fill out because they don’t realise that it’s obscured) and various bits and pieces of my theme, but, fortunately, there is an easy way to tell the difference between legitimate code and code that has been hacked, so i don’t worry about it… that much.

and a couple of the places that had residue were things that i installed a while ago, but have consistently not worked correctly pretty much ever since i installed them, which makes me wonder if they will work more consistently now that i’ve removed the residue of being hacked…