Trackback spam

There’s a new spambot circulating that hits blog sites via trackbacks instead of comments, thus evading most spam-fighting systems. I’ve been hit several hundred times in the past 24 hours myself.

How I fixed it:

1. Long ago, I turned off allowing pings/trackbacks. In WordPress, you can find this under Options and then Discussions.
2. That only helps with new posts. I can’t recall when I started with that, so going back and editing hundreds of previous posts to turn off pings all at once is a bit daunting for the middle of the work week. Instead, each time I shove the spam over to the moderation queue or just hit SPAM and kill it, I also edit the original post, deactivating pings/trackbacks, which slowly closes the security hole.

Jonah’s been getting hit with it, too. Evil bastards. (Apparently, the spam is coming from spyware that’s botting multiple infected users’ machines. Please use virus/spyware protection, folks!)

Good luck, fellow bloggers.

1 Comment »

1. […] My blog has been bombed by hunderts of trackback spams the last 2 hours. And I’m not the only one as I figured out via Technorati, there’s for example Twig, Beau, Avery, and bronzefinger having the same problem. […]

   Pingback by Trackback Spam - Steffen Rusitschka’s Blog — May 18, 2006 @ 10:55

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