Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Trackback spam

Author: S.Atty (1 May 07 8:13am)

Are there any plans to do anything with Project HoneyPot and trackback spam.

Trackback spam is a major pain - I ran a blog with trackbacks on my site for about 18 months, I killed trackbacks off after about 8 months due to the spam (I deleted the file and removed links about it from the site). I dropped the blog system about 2 months ago but I'm still getting 15-20 attempts to post to trackback.php using a specific post ID.

Re: Trackback spam

Author: H.Bokhoven (1 May 07 4:32pm)

Trackback spam is indeed a major PITA on my WordPress-weblog - even worse than regular comment-spam!
I tried to stop the major TBS (trackback-spammers) by denying them access in my Apache2 httpd-config, but some are so stubborn (read: automated), they keep on coming back so I denied them complete access by adding a firewall-rule. And still the try to hit...
For now I (also) added a special WP-plugin to deny direct access to "trackback.php" (besides using the "Spam Karma2"-plugin).

I guess there is an even greater opportunity for Project Honeypot to go after these guys.

Re: Trackback spam

Author: M.Prince (1 May 07 5:07pm)

If we can get data on the trackback spammers IPs then we can include it in http:BL. I don't think the current implementation of our honey pots would give us that data, but we're open to any ways to get more data on who the bad guys are.

Re: Trackback spam

Author: H.Bokhoven (1 May 07 5:22pm)

Thanks for the comment(s) on my posts, mr. Prince!
May I suggest taking a look at (some of) the code that makes up the plugins of "Spam Karma2". I think they include lots of useful features (eg. blacklist, javascript - and encrypted payload, etc.) to improve your success on catching the bad guys.

The URL is http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

Post Edited (1 May 07 5:23pm)