Comments on: Upgrading the Defenses

By: Darius

Darius — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 21:08:00 +0000

another two free web proxies

http://anon.emigrantas.com
http://proxy.emigrantas.com – text based

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:59:27 +0000

Battle Testing Spam Karma
Now let’s really run Spam Karma through its paces!

I’m going to have it protect GFMorris.com—the Three Strikes attempt wasn’t acting much different than what I presently had—and I’ve removed all other protections. I even cleaned out my mode…

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:24:03 +0000

Well, best as I know, John, SK uses a Bayesian filter. Were you getting TrackBack spam, as I was? If so, what the spammers were doing was an end run on wp-comments.php and all plugins [including SK] that filter on that file.

By: John Wilson

John Wilson — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:20:09 +0000

Spam karma did *nothing* for the types of spam I was receiving yesterday Geof. They kept trickling in, so I’m assuming that spammers have already adapted to some of the protections that SK offers.

What I want is SK with a bayesian filter.

By: MtDewVirus

MtDewVirus — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 05:19:54 +0000

WordPress Plugins: Trackback And Pingback Moderation
These two plugins basically do the same thing, but I wanted to keep them seperate. When you turn one on, it will automatically place either all trackbacks or all pingbacks (depending on the plugin) into the comment moderation queue. It’s meant as a si…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 04:34:50 +0000

Oh…and I agree with Brad on the blackhole list plugins. They seem to make the assumption that open email proxy == open web proxy. It’s a good try, but I’m not sure the right blackhole list exists.

The three new gadgets look pretty interesting, though. Unsurprisingly, they appear to take a very SpamAssassin-ish approach (wide spectrum of tests). That really seems to be the way to go for content checking.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 04:20:36 +0000

Even with a tweaked SpamAssassin setup (complete with force-feed training of all spam back into the Bayes mechanism), I still tend to get several spams a day. Most of it is REALLY obviously spam when I look at it. That’s small compared to what it successfully blocks, and I never have any false positives. However, it’s a sign to me that automated content filtering still isn’t “smart” enough. I’m not convinced it ever will be.

(BTW, I also tried CRM114…you know, the one that claims 99.something percent accuracy? Nope. My mix of spam and ham was too weird for it. It actually started trending worse after a while. SA is much better for me…and requires much less feeding.)

As far as weblog comments go, both the spamming techniques and the filtering software I’ve seen so far look a bit behind their email brethren. I don’t see why things won’t trend the same way, though. End result: we’re chasing the spammers instead of getting in front of them.

…not that there’s a perfect way to get in front of them either. *shrug* My point isn’t that content filtering is terrible. Only that it’s not a silver bullet. Each of us has to find what works best for his/her own application.

I will say this, though. I never thought about the captcha-trackback problem before I read this. I’m not sure I would have seen it coming even if I used trackbacks.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 02:23:17 +0000

Yeah, I took a look at the one you linked to that does a DSBL lookup. It makes the assumption that blog comment spammers are run from the same places as email spammers. I don’t know how good that assumption is, but there must be some overlap. It’s a good start, I’d say.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:22:30 +0000

Brad:

A few of the folks at the leading edge of the comment spam fight [mainly plugin writers] do make their banlists known. Others say that centralized systems don’t work.

I know that, right now, some plugin writers are utilizing the RBL and other spam-oriented IP ban lists that have far greater scope than just WP. That makes sense to me, as does your proposal.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:03:41 +0000

What’s needed is some sort of central registry where WP blogs can automatically pull banned IPs from, and where WP admins can submit IPs to. Something similar to the Netcraft toolbar for phishing websites.

I think it’d be conceptually very simple, just a list of IPs and how many WP admins had banned each IP. Then WP admins could have some kind of threshold for IP bans (say, I wouldn’t allow comments from IPs that have been banned by five other admins) in order to avoid spiteful IP bans (say I don’t like Geof, so to prevent him from commenting I submit his IP address). Tweaking would be needed to prevent abuse, but I think it could work somehow.

Something’s needed in order to avoid having each and every single WP admin fight the battle alone. Hell, the list of IP addresses could be published by RSS and your WP site would pick it up once or twice a day…

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 23:13:35 +0000

SpamKarma’s been working wonders for me in the five or six days that I’ve had it running.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:03:08 +0000

See, I’m not having a problem with content-based filtering for email at all. I have a spambox for SpamAssassin to dump my spam emails into, and I check it it every couple of weeks or so. I rarely find a single false positive. :shrug:

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 21:54:50 +0000

“…captchas are irrelevant…”

Only if you actually use trackback. I don’t, so the captcha is working beautifully for me. Obviously that’s not the choice that most WP users would make, but it makes sense for slidingconstant (where I get a handful of legitimate comments a year).

In addition, I’m just pessimistic in general about content-based filtering. It’s only barely working for email.

By: [rmfo-blogs.com]: About

[rmfo-blogs.com]: About — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 21:44:52 +0000

Testing Spam Karma
As announced, The About Log is testing the Spam Karma plugin as its sole spam-stopping solution.

I’m serious about comment spam; it’s a burden to have 50+ users, many of whom don’t have or can’t make the time to delete their spam, and a solution…