Network Security Blog

Learning Movable Type: Concerning Spam

I got hit by a comment spammer again last night, much to my annoyance. I was a little suprised, because I have taken a number of measures to prevent as much of this as possible. I guess it wasn’t enough.

The first thing I noticed that was different about this comment spam is that it was all concentrated in just a few of my postings. I’ve closed all the older postings for comments, and now I’ve closed everything older than 15 days. I’d also renamed the mt-comments.cgi to my-comments.cgi. I guess they figured that out. Shouldn’t have been hard for the spammer, but I’m suprised the bot in use was able to figure it out. I’m going to try renaming again and see how long it takes for them to figure it out again.

I’ve tried mt-blacklist, but for some reason it breaks the ability to rebuild the site. I think it has something to do with the fact that I started this with MT 2.64 then patched when a vulnerability was discovered, rather than upgrading. I may have to upgrade to version 3 soon.

Anyways, I’m off to try and defend my territory again.