Posts Tagged Akismet

Huge Spam Wave

spam[1]After the weekend’s festivities, we returned home on Sunday.  On Monday, after having settled in a bit and gotten the kids off to school, I sat down to post the pictures in yesterday’s entry.

We’ve gotten a lot of spam in the past, but it was ridiculous yesterday.  85 new messages had come in since I posted Friday.  Most were the usual “Anubis Gates” pharmaceutical shill, but there was another type of gibberish spew that had apparently walked through my blog, targeting a pretty decent subset of all the posts I have.

With Akismet, of course, it’s the work of a moment to delete them all, but this was by far the biggest wave I’ve been hit by.  Akismet has registered something less than 600 spams total, making the weekend’s attack 15% of all the spam I’ve ever gotten on this blog.

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The Egyptian God of Spam

anubis[1]I’m starting to get quite an inflow of spam on this site.  That’s not too surprising in and of itself, but what is surprising is that 95% of it is going to a single, very old post — my book review of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

I’m kind of at a loss to explain why, although I do have a few theories:

  1. There is an anti-spam company called “AnubisNetworks” that they might think I’m referring to, and this might be attracting spammer attention for reasons ranging from sheer stupidity to full-on DoS attempts.
  2. The spammers might be interpreting “Anubis” as a misspelling of “anus” and flagging it as a target post.
  3. Similarly, “Anubis” or “Anubis Gate” might have some bizarre and likely obscene meaning I’m not aware of, and thus draws spammers seeking a community of perverts to exploit.
  4. These spammers might be big Tim Powers fans, although this is probably giving them more credit for literary taste than they deserve.
  5. These spam messages might actually be attempted communications from immaterial, primordial entities, drawn through some Jungian affinity by the reference to possibly the most ancient known archetypal psychopomp.  Since these entities would have only the most vague and general knowledge of humanity, their missives refer solely to mankind’s most primal drives — sex, money and cheap foreign drugs — along with a healthy dose of apparent gibberish.  Although seemingly meaningless, they undoubtedly contain a stark, alien wisdom when properly interpreted through the lens of obscure and ancient lore.

I’m really holding out for #5, but I’d settle for that as the plot of the next Tim Powers or Charles Stross novel.

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First Spam Wave

2007-08-02Spam[1]I’ve gotten hit with several individual comment spams, but this morning when I got up there were a ton stacked up in the queue.  I would have caught them anyway as I have manual comment approval turned on, but thanks to Akismet it had already done the work of categorizing them as spam, so all I had to do was purge them.

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Akismet

plugin[1]Due to the recent spam attack, I decided to activate the Akismet spam-blocking plugin for this blog.  It’s something that comes built in to this distribution, but in order to use it you need a WordPress API key, which requires registration with wordpress.com.

So I now have a WordPress account, but since I host my own blog, the only thing it gets me is the short string of digits required to turn on the spam-filtering plugin.

So far I haven’t gotten hit with any more spam, so I’m not sure how it’s working yet.  I’ll update if I’m hit in the future…

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