Why am I suddenly being flood with spam?

The 2 issues may be completely unrelated. The most common vector for a local machine virus is email or via a file that you downloaded. Is the comment spam related to specific posts on your site?

Hi esmi,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, with titles ‘Master of health informatics’ and ‘Tax offset changes to boost R & D’ – which could be kind of suggestive if you look at them the wrong way.

I’ve run Donncha’s Exploit Scanner plugin which came up clean and put some of the problem IPs into my WordPress blacklist. I’m running in Safe Mode at the moment because of the virus damage until I can get the o/s fixed.

It’s more than likely that those 2 posts currently have a high PR in Google – thus attracting the attention of the spammers as well as regular visitors. In my experience, this kind of sudden flood rarely lasts more than a few days but then tends to re-occur a month or so later. As long as you’re running Akismet and nothing is getting through, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Thank you very much Esmi – both for the reply and relatively good news. I’ll keep an eye on things and see if they settle down in the next day or so.