If you want this website to link to your own site, send me an email or comment indicating so and I’ll review the request, but I won’t respond.

I am pretty sure that 99% of the link requests I get are spammers, but just in case… I wanted to cover it.

This is my personal site and I will only link to other sites if I really feel it’s necessary or pertinent…. otherwise… too bad.

My personal WordPress blog (the one I host) has Akismet to filter the likely spam from the real comments; and it is working… but the scope of this 11 days and running long attack is mind boggling. IP address ranges of mostly hacked PCs indicate that the bot-net spreading the comment spam circles the globe and is sophisticated enough to vary the attack from each hacked PC suck that the obvious triggers are not caught by the anti-spam firewalls. This indicates to me that there are a LOT of Windows based PCs that are doing far more than their owners want them to do.

It also raises liability questions. I used to think that if you were the unwitting victim of an attack, and while hacked your PC did something illegal, you should not be held accountable. I am not sure anymore and begin to question if everyone who puts a machine on the net does not have some obligation to prevent it’s being used illegally. Statistically, most of the hacked PCs have had no steps taken to secure them at all. Is that not a little frightening?

The product this attack is pushing are black market brand name drugs; and the language of the hook text in the spam is so poorly constructed that I suspect it’s all from Eastern European programmers being paid by organized crime syndicates. Hopefully the crime lords have to pay by the comment injected wether it actually gets published on our blogs or not; for at least then some programmer is getting paid and sucking the money out of the criminal’s hands.

It does also make me wonder how much of a markup the drug companies are charging for legal drugs; this method of marketing is hideously inefficient – but they must be getting a return on their “investment” which implies the margins are staggering.

In fact, I am now encumbered with a moral/ethical decision… should I subscribe the address they send me to every spammer and dubious porn site on the planet so they get their own treatment?

Mine is an evil laugh.

I am sad, as I had hoped it would help prevent the deluge of spam.

I am seeing some comments get rejected that look legitimate, because the question was left unanswered.

200.63.42.141
200.63.42.136
85.29.204.193

The first two don’t resolve in DNS. The third is a floating IP at ipv4.vnet.ee; I am not sure what that domain is for, but a lot of folks blacklist the entire domain for sending email spam.

Huge thank you to Nick Berlette the author of is_human() and the Akismet team. Have a great weekend!

Update: I have pulled is_human() off my blog as it blocks too much legitimate commentary and cannot stop linkback/trackback spam. Grrr.

Sadly, the marker for a required field did not get enabled initially (now fixed) and a few comments were lost, sorry. If you commented in the last 4 days and feel your comment was ignore/discarded unfairly, simply re-submit; I welcome discussion with opposing points of view, but SPAM is not welcome here.

Update: I have pulled is_human() off my blog as it blocks too much legitimate commentary and cannot stop linkback/trackback spam. Grrr.

FYI – for those who are still using Blogspot; Google has done something silly to the capcha code that blocks comment spammers, and I cannot comment on your Blogspot blogs anymore.

Making things worse a few guest blogs I help friends run had the same problem. So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 (thanks to DreamHost for making that a “one click” per blog install) and huge thanks to the WordPress team for including the upgrade to Akismet plug-in 2.0 in that install. I am hoping that shuts down the vermin.

Makes one glad that LJ handles all this stuff for you… My LJ blog was completely un-impacted by the burst in spam activity over the weekend. Yay LiveJournal!