I feared the worst when my own site got a random comment attached to a very old post with the words "Nice Site!". As suspected, the poster's URL leads to a commercial porn site. Now I see the same spammer has hit Blogcritics. Looks like a lot of MT blogs have been hit. With just one spam post on my blog, I got off lightly.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light, another victim, wishes a case of boils on the perpetrator. I'll add a severe case of piles to that. I'll leave it to Eric to suggest further unpleasant ailments.
This post on the Movable Type support forum suggests a drastic solution; renaming the legitimate MT Comments script, and replacing the original with a spider trap that adds the perp to the banned IP list in the HTACCESS file.
Meanwhile someone's done some detective work and identified the porn spammer as based in, you've guessed it, Florida. There's always the Traveller Imperial Navy solution; "Nuke the state from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!"
If you run a Movable Type blog, be sure to add the IP Address: 209.210.176.20 to your IP ban list.
Article comments
1 - Ms. Tek
I'm actually thinking of moving from movabletype. It's so popular now there are a lot of problems with it cropping up.
2 - san
Blog comment spamming may be bad; but what's worse is how long it took somebody to come up with the idea.
3 - jim@resonation.ca
I got spammed five times today from this same idiot. Great, they've destroyed email, now they're wreaking MT.
The problem with banning IP is these commons assasins just change numbers.
4 - Frost
yeah... we got that lolita lady posting on buzzgrinder. I was going to click on the link to her site while at work, but thought I would wait until I got home... just in case.
I'm so glad I did... I'm sure the sys admin would have been none too happy with me. (plus I've only worked there four weeks, so...)
5 - san
You have someone at your job who goes through every web site that anyone visits? Wow! And they said there wouldn't be enough jobs for us all in 1984.
6 - san
Here's another fo the IP ban, fresh off my site:
203.126.85.98
7 - Phillip Winn
They hit up Blogcritics with a "Nice Site" post on day, then about 20 times or so the next day on a variety of random old posts with a comment that reads only "shalomzzk" or something like that. I deleted them all out of the database pretty quickly, but didn't rebuild all of the pages, so you might still see them here or there.
Eric does a pretty good job of actively managing the comment situation, deleting the spam that shows up pretty constantly, from what I understand. The only reason Lolita lasted as long as she did is that she popped in while we're having some speed problems in the comment system. Sorry about that.
8 - Tim Hall
By the looks of it, the Lolita spam hit just about every Moveable Type site on the net. It's certainly not an isolated incident of Blogcritics. A lot of sites are talking about it.
9 - Phillip Winn
Is it really limited to just MT sites? Or is it just that almost all blog sites are MT sites these days? <grin>
10 - Natalie Davis
Thanks for IPs. My blog is Typepad-powered, but better safe than sorry. Thank goodness for the ban feature.
11 - Tim Hall
Blogdex lists all the sites that have been hit; there are some big names there.
If the power of the blogosphere has brought down politicans and journalists, one scumbag spammer has no chance.
12 - mary hodder
I've been getting tons of those, from a variety of IP addresses:
62.42.228.6
as well as a bunch from:
209.210.176.22
and others from the 209.210. range.
I emailed the company that has the 201.210.x.x range (eli.net, an electrical company in Seattle, that I suspect has nothing to do with this, but left a relay open...) but the 62.42.228.x looks like it might actually belong to them. Anyway, closing off IP addresses won't solve it. I'm looking into changing the cgi script for MT comments, to see if a slight shift makes the comments field harder. In the meantime, I've removed the comments template, so that if you click on comments on the front page you get a blank screen and therefore can only leave comments by clicking on the permalink, and filling in the comments fields at the bottom of the post. For now, that seems to have stopped this one guy.
13 - Mac Diva
The worst thing I've gotten came in the form of email, usually saying, " Very young!" (as if I'm just dying to breast feed or something). Why would anyone even think most people are interested in child porn?
And, consider the legal implications. Someone who is either naive or evil could believe we solicited these comments and emails, making us appear guilty of . . . . I don't even want to think about it.
14 - Tim Hall
The more I read about this, the more I think it's the Blogosphere's equivalent to the Cantor & Seigel "Green Card" spam on Usenet all those years ago. I suspect just about every big MT site has been hit.
It's being suggested that the spammer's main aim is to increase their site's ranking in Google.
15 - Eric Olsen
Perhaps all we really have to do is tell Uma Thurman about it.
16 - BigNickTv
i think all you should shut up and get a real life, just look at how preety i am
http://nicole.king.users.btopenworld.com/images/30_7_03_1.jpg