January 27th, 2010 by Stargazer
Is WP-Blackcheck effective?
That was the basic question of the research I did during the last days, greping through the logs to find some info to get an impression of the blacklists effect. Now I know, it isn’t in vain. If we’d say we have 10000 requests we would get about:
- 9000 Spam Comments
- 1000 Ham Comments
- 100 Reports
Tags: blog, spam, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
Spam or Virus?
October 15th, 2009 by Stargazer
Today I had one of those typical spam malware in my mailbox, showing that Microsoft Outlook is one of the most widely used mail programs, being attacked all the time:
Microsoft Outlook Notification for the xxxx@xxxx.xx
Support [xxxx@xxxx.xx]
Sent :Thu 15/10/2009 06:38
To xxxx@xxxx.xx
Attachment install.zip (12kb)
You have (6) New Message from Outlook Microsoft
- Please re-configure your Microsoft Outlook Again.
- Download attached setup file and install.
True, this mail usually is a bad one, but nevertheless it made me grin due to the fact that I was using Thunderbird and KMail for managing my personal mail flood. So I checked the mail headers and found out that it came from a spamhost somewhere in the net.
Tags: Malware, spam, virus, windows
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
The blacklist again…
August 12th, 2009 by Stargazer
It is wonderful if you know that a plan is working – especially if it’s your own one. Regarding the WP-Blackcheck plugin, it might even fot more here as I was observing less and less spam comments into the moderation queues of the sites I manage. To get some numbers I tried to deactivate a number of other anti spam plug ins and compared the numbers.
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
Is it me John Wayne, is it you?
August 6th, 2009 by Stargazer
Some spammers can really drive you mad – especially if they are doing things like that. Looking at my mailserver logs I have found some strange IP addresses like 123.27.3.81, 222.252.80.188 or 123.16.13.188 which are resolving to ‘localhost’ regarding to their reverse DNS. In other words, a bad configured mailserver thinks that the mail comes from itself and offers special treatment to that messages – which usually means they bypass the spamfilter. The problem can be solved quite simple by using ‘127.0.0.1′ instead of ‘localhost’ in your configuration files and you got green conditions again.
Posted in: Malware | 2 Comments »
WP-Blackcheck – Statusreport
June 25th, 2009 by Stargazer
My Blacklist service is running for quite a while now and it it’s time to look at the result. Sure, it isn’t much as not many people provided feedback by reporting the IPs, but for now we have collected about 60 IP Addresses and the blogs hosted on my server haven’t had any spam in their queue except for mine, which gets tortured by the spam kids – but they don’t know that they’re doing me a favor doing so as they’re exposing their spam hosts…
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 1 Comment »
WP-BlackCheck goes WP.org
June 8th, 2009 by Stargazer
During the last days I have sent out some preview versions of my plugin and got some feedback about the plugin which helped me getting things done. Due to the positive echo of various people, I am now posting it on wordpress.org. But I think it’s time now to tell you some of my ideas about the plugin and why I wrote it.
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 2 Comments »
Together we’re stronger
June 4th, 2009 by Stargazer
I was fed up with the comment spam again as it’s me who has to check the akismet queue for false positives. So I have started preventing spam by doing various checks before handing the comment over to akismet – but it’s always a couple of them slipping through. The good thing was, that it’s always the same hosts doing so, regarding the IP addresses.
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 3 Comments »