Starting on January 12, 2009, another blog I run came under severe spam attack and it has been increasing since. Until that point it had received maybe a couple dozen spam comments, at the most. On January 12, 2009, it jumped up to 217, then to 361 on the 13th, and 409 already today!
Thanks to the Akismet plugin for WordPress, only one spam comment made it through to the queue. Akismet has successfully blocked over 1,300 pieces of spam in the past month. Take a look at these stats!
Looking into this further, I found that much of this spam was comming from 83.233.30.32, which is located in Sweden based on the WHOIS search I did on that IP address. I also contacted the two abuse email addresses on file. I’ll post an update if I get a response.
So, consider this a heads up – make sure you have Akismet installed. It’s easy to set up and to get a key, you only need to register on WordPress.com. Once you register, check your profile and copy/paste the key into the Akismet Configuration page.
Also, you may want to add 83.233.30.32 to your IP Deny Manager if you use cPanel, or whatever ban list your host provides. While I was at it, I banned the 194.8.75.* range as some of the spam was coming from there as well, but not nearly as much…
