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December 12, 2004
Blog Comment Spam Becomes an Epidemic
Like lots of people, I run Movable Type. Like lots of people who run Movable Type and at least one inbound link, I've also found it necessary to install mt-blacklist to keep the blogspam down to a sensible level.
OK, so it's a pain in the arse to have to do the clearout of a couple of hundred emails once a new one slips through the net, but at least I've got a tool to make the process relatively painless.
Until now.
Yesterday, I got an email from the monitoring system at the otherwise lovely pair.com saying that they'd turned off the mt-comments.cgi script on my server space because (and I paraphrase) it was hammering the servers into submission. I needed to check their AUP before I changed the privs back to 755.
However, the cumulative effect over the whole of pair has been huge. In order to check if there was anything I should do about it, over and above hoping another attack did the same, I searched on Google for "pair.com mt-comments.cgi". And back came page after page after page after page of blogs which are now indexed as having their comments not available. All pair.com Movable Type instances have been hit - cumulatively the blog spammers had added up to a massive Denial Of Service attack.
I guess this means it's time to upgrade to MT3 and get typekey. (And yes, I did pay money for this one). At least the exchange rate is in my favour at the moment...
Posted by Tom Dolan at December 12, 2004 10:48 PM
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