Anyone else getting a ton of random WP spam today?

November 12, 2008 — 3 Comments

Most of my WordPress blogs are getting a ton of bizarre spam comments today.  They comments all consist of something like “435hjh034iuhn34″, with no URL and a presumably fake name and e-mail, like this:

Each of my blogs has probably let about six of these get through today, when normally I have to manually remove maybe one comment (often none).  Askimet is up-to-date on all of them, so I don’t know what’s up.

Anyone else seeing this?  Any idea what the spammers have to gain from this crap?

Update: Here’s the solution, at least for now.

In your admin panel, go to “Settings” –> “Discussion” and scroll down to the “Comment Blacklist” box.  Enter the following:

94.102.60.

That’s it!  That’ll stop all of the IPs that doing this round of attacks, though more may be coming soon if this proves to be a useful thing for them…

mickey

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3 responses to Anyone else getting a ton of random WP spam today?

  1. Yup, same here. They’re all coming from 94.102.60 IPs which appear to come from Amsterdam. I’ve never gotten a single non-spam from that IP range so I just blocked that IP string.

  2. Any insights as to why Akismet has been missing these? Doesn’t it work off of a community-powered system? I would think there would have been enough people marking these as spam for it to catch them.

  3. Mike — That surprised me too. With the thousands of “spam” clicks on those today, I don’t know why Akismet didn’t automatically adapt to them.

    Blocking the IP range seems to have fixed it for me.

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