The amount of spam I’ve been receiving on this blog had been skyrocketing lately. It reached the point that it was pretty much an everyday chore to clear it out. So, like many before me I decided to activate the Akismet (version 2.2.1) plug-in.

All was well for a few days. But then, out of nowhere, Akismet began calling my attention to an unbelievable amount of trackback spam. By ‘unbelievable’ I mean several a minute, sometimes. Hundreds and hundreds overnight.

Now, that shouldn’t be a problem because they’ll go away on their own after a period of time. But what about legitimate stuff? There could be some of that, and it’s important to flag it so Akismet ‘learns’.  Um, that’s what they say, anyway. The trouble, of course, is that the longer the list of stuff to look over becomes, the harder it is to identify the good stuff.

This morning I logged on to see 17 l-o-n-g pages of it. Something would have to be done!

Here’s what a typical entry on the Akismet Caught Spam page looks like.

All instances share the IP address of 82.233.30.32 which is linked to a whois search. If I point my browser at the IP directly I see a typical Apache test page – the server the offending server is powered by CentOS. A reverse-DNS doesn’t give any more insight – no other host names. Google doesn’t have it cached, either. The IP is probably spoofed…

The text of the spam changes a bit, as does the host name. When I point my browser at the host name, though, there’s some kind of content for just the briefest instant, but then it quickly changes to a typical blog has been removed page. In fact, every one I’ve looked at is exactly like this.

Whaddya know, onlinecasino21.blogspot.com doesn’t resolve to the IP address I mentioned earlier, either. What a surprise, right?

Anyway, it would be nice if Akismet allowed you to filter the spam and apply a delete all to the result. But it doesn’t, so we’ll have to take more drastic measures.

Turning off trackbacks and pingbacks (same setting) would probably work but I’d rather not do that. Blacklisting the address in WordPress doesn’t work, Akismet still gets it first. Here’s what I did. In my .htaccess file I added these sections.

And that seems to have applied the brakes. I haven’t seen another instance of this spam for several hours.

Another thing that just might be worth mentioning. I run several blogs and when I was activating Akismet to mine I activated it on the others as well. But this – my personal blog – is the only one that’s been troubled by this onslaught of trackback spam. I don’t know who I pissed off out there, but somebody – or something – has latched on and it ain’t letting go.