Friday Roundup: Cracking down on comment spammers

Welcome to Friday Roundup. It is Friday, February 3rd, 2017. Hello everyone, I'm John Peterson with Develare. Today's topic is "Cracking down on comment spammers".

You start out with about 50 mailing list subscriptions to one of our clients' websites. They've got one of those little input boxes or forms on their website for getting folks to sign up to their mailing list. All of a sudden all of these spammy email addresses were coming in from Russia and our client doesn't have any folks in Russia that he works with. There's an easy way to just look at them and say, "You know what, we don't need these." We filtered them out.

In that same week on the same site we got another 150 plus spammy comments on the blog also from Russia. We're using a service called Akismet and normally Akismet does a really awesome job of keeping comment spam off the blog. In fact, in the last six months Akismet blocked 18,371 spammy comments from reaching the blog. If I look at stats that puts them at about a 99.93% effectiveness rating. This guy for whatever reason was able to sail right on through Akismet, get his spammy comments on the blog, causing a lot of pain for us.

We went in, found the IP address and then we used another service called the Sucuri Website Firewall to block just that IP address. We blacklisted it. I looked back again today and I saw there were another 292 attacks on the website just from that IP address, and so we stopped him with Sucuri Website Firewall.

After listening through all of this I need you to ask yourself, "Is your website protected?" I hope you find this topic helpful. Feel free to add some comments below and I'd be happy to chat with you. Once again, this is John Peterson with Develare, signing off.