2.5 Upgrade lead to Spam?

  • Resolved ewizac

    (@ewizac)


    16 years, 10 months ago

    Hi guys,

    Well I just made the upgrade to version 2.5.1 after no longer wanting to see that yellow tag on my admin. All in all I am happy with the new structure and style, (though I wish the login was a little more customizable). Anyway, I used to use version 2.3, and everything was fine. Though this installation works fine, I all of a sudden got flooded with spam comments.

    What’s more strange is they didn’t comment on a actual post, but an uploaded image by using its permalink to get to a page where they can comment just on the image, (so you wouldn’t see it unless you knew where to go). I installed WP-SpamFree and its been catching the comments, 51 so far that just keep commenting on the same image permalink post.

    The comments themselves are nothing but links to other sites, they automatically got thrown into moderation before I installed WP-SpamFree, now they are just deleted.

    Anyway, I’m wondering what I did that could have made this happen? Is this a bot attack or is someone trying to crash me? I used AskApache hardening plugin to secure my folders just to be safe. What should I do, or is this something that will pass?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • This isn’t an attack per se, rather groups that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in the socail networking aspects of commonly used programs like wordpress to obtain large numbers of links to their sites, trying to get a boost in the search engines as well as capturing stray traffic from all over the place.

    They have very likely randomly selected a post or post item number and are using that to post comments to your blog.

    My suggestion is check the IP address of the posters and the destinations of the links. Example, if you keep seeing the same IP, blacklist the IP (or better ask your host to block the IP). If all the links are to info domains, then blacklist .info/ in any post. I have a pretty standard list of things like .pl/ .ru/ .info/ .cn/ and a few others that keeps the crap down to reasonable levels.

    Thread Starter ewizac

    (@ewizac)

    Wow great, thanks man. I guess it was just coincidence that this happened on the same day as my 2.5 upgrade. I’ll call my hosting company and have them blacklist the IP if any of them make it through the filter, or I can just do it myself. I’m glad that this is just some random bot thing, I didn’t want to have a year of hard work down the tubs!

    Thanks

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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