If you have a Blog you are probably very familiar with Blog Spam. Two of the most popular security options is Captcha and the “Math Problem”. So, I was getting dozens of spam on one of my blog and most of it was porn. So, I put in the Captcha security option. And one spammer got around it, and he was posting about 1500 spam’s per day. Now, these weren’t showing up, as I had the comments set to “moderate”. But it was a pain having to clear the spam every day. So, we put in a second level of security … and about a week or two later, they got around that one too and the spam resumed. The IP address was in EU.

So, I did some digging and found one of their blogs, and put in my .htaccess file that when their IP came in, to route it to their blog. So, when they posted their spam comments through their comment automater, they would be spamming their own blog! It worked well. However, I must have made them mad, because above 5 hours after doing it, our server got nailed with attacks … so I took down the “return volley” and just did a denial of service. The attacks stopped and we are now more than 24 hours since the spam attack … so far no spam.

So, if you run a blog, make sure you have the comments set to be moderated before they are posted, so you are protected against Spam, and monitor any spam you get. Abuses simply put their IP address in your “denial service” in your .htaccess (Apache Servers). The code is below:

order allow,Deny
Deny from IPADDRESS
allow from all

Of course you would enter the IP ADDRESS to deny where it is clearly indicated. Also, while tricks like I did above are fun to do, and sometimes funnier to tell your friends, what happened above is a clear indication that regardless of how good you think you are on the web, there is always someone better. And clearly, that includes me as well. Be careful out there. If you shove somebody on the ‘Net, they might just shove back harder.

Have fun fellas!