There seems to be some kind of system-wide assault going on right now on this corner of the internet. I’m getting blasted by TONS of trackback/pingback spam for some phenteremine website. And it looks like Kylark is seeing some of that action as well. If you run a WordPress blog and are encountering this same assault, I recommend something like the Moderate Trackback and Moderate Pingback plugins from MtDewVirus. They automatically put all of them into moderation where they can be deleted en masse. It’s not perfect but it’s no big deal either.
Aside from that though - and this is weird - I went to leave a comment on Garrett’s recent post about a blog written by some kind of spamming script. And when I went to hit “Submit” on the comment, the page redirected to the FBI.gov website. Can somebody else leave a comment there and see if it’s happening for them too? Perhaps my computer or network has contracted a virus. Or maybe something a lot crazier is going down.
UPDATE!
Just got word from Garrett the FBI thing is some kind of after-effect of anti-spam plugins in WP. Here are some posts about it on the WP support forums.
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6 Comments
I’ve also just installed Akismet so hopefully a lot of these spam problems will be diminished even further:
http://akismet.com/faq/
yeah, i already had that. it puts them all into batch moderation. no sweat.
hold on…
there’s a FBI assault team outside my door…
FUCK!!
Seems like pingbacks are being used to probe your version of wp as there seems to be a recent bug, I would assume buffer overflow as the likely desired effect.
xml-rpc call plus malicious code and incorrect user permissions (like if the pingback flooded your buffer and inserted an o/s command to set up a pptp tunnel and environment for a user who can log in remotely because his xml shit was run as administrator or the service account for apache.
I would expect a phenteramine company using php probes to want to infiltrate in order to hijack your mail server and send spam.
Apparently you can do:
“0×0031 (49)
Access denied ” as a return code so there must be some type of filtering module
The bad news is that XMLRPC is plain scary and you may be getting a little probe against your system with each pingback
“The payload is in XML, a single structure.
The must contain a sub-item, a string, containing the name of the method to be called. The string may only contain identifier characters, upper and lower-case A-Z, the numeric characters, 0-9, underscore, dot, colon and slash. It’s entirely up to the server to decide how to interpret the characters in a methodName. ”
Like how bout i rip on mysql usernames not “mary’s blog linked to joe’s”
or you gotta have perl installed with php right? Lots you can do to the os there, good luck.
-tc
Uh…. what? So what do I need to do?
I had exactly the same phenteremine attacks for ages. In the end, I found they were mostly coming from a particular subnet range, so I just just blocked that subnet (via .htaccess). I kept getting lots of spam after from other sites though, another reason why I packed in wordpress. That’s why I’m now comment free and happy at the moment
Well, you know you can just turn off comments and trackbacks in WordPress, right? It’s really no reason to leave WP. Anyway, with this blog, I’m also really not willing to turn them off because the whole point is the conversational element, really. But this Akismet plugin seems to be getting the job done just fine.
One Trackback
[...] While we’re on the subject, also check out the spammy blog posts that Garrett recently discovered. Are they written by a real person or a script which is able to simulate natural language? Then we have the enormous spam attacks several of us have been enduring via comments and trackbacks on our WordPress blogs. [...]