.Net Geek » Spam

Foil the spam robots with SpamPoison

Aakash — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:57:51 +0000

SpamPoison is a small but useful utility to fight against spammers. It won’t directly help you in bringing down spam in your blog/Inbox but will stop spammers harvesting information which they can use for sending spam emails. Spammers usually get email addresses with the help of Bots. Bots (also known as wanderers, spiders or crawlers) crawls a web page and continually retrieving linked pages for extracting any email like string and store it in a database. Certainly this database is further used for sending spam emails using mass mailer software. Spam poison identifies these spammer’s crawlers and feed them through an infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses. All you have to do is link back this page so that whenever a spammer’s robot scans your page, it will be sucked into this one. To link to this page, just use this simple code:

http://english-130430879095.spampoison.com">Fight Spam! Click Here!

Busting Spam in My dasBlog

Aakash — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:33:37 +0000

SPAM. Every one hate it and Why not? No one wish to waste his/her time in searching through all messages for a few legitimate messages. I have been receiving lot of SPAM comments before I find an effective way to stop it. (God knows why they were trying to sell Viagra and what not on my blog) To fight it, I have had enabled CAPTCHA for comments on my blog. Enabling the CAPTCHA discouraged SPAM and amount of SPAM goes down significantly, but the genuine posts were also reduced. I believe that visitors don’t want to bear the pain of entering the security words while posting comments. I can understand this because even I feel discouraged leaving comment where someone has enabled CAPTCHA on their blogs. I really wanted to stop SPAM but not at the cost of comments of my dear readers. Other possible way to spam is to blacklist IPs responsible for SPAM messages. However, you just can’t create a list of black listed IPs and keep adding as you encounter the new one. They are very clever and keep changing their IPs frequently.

Finally, I found Akismet is one other good (may be best) service which is helping the bloggers to fight SPAM. “Akismet is an automated spam blocking service which blocks Spam as it learns from its users/community marking SPAM Comments as “SPAM”. Luckily, dasBlog (my blog runs on dasBlog engine.) have implemented the Akismet service and can be enabled by entering the API Key under “Configuration” of dasBlog. Anyone, using dasBlog can enable this service as shown in picture below.

(You need to enter the API Key box – How to get Akismet API Key)

It’s been two months I am using their service and I am very happy with it. I like them so much (possibly I’m so confident now) that, now I am deleting any SPAM straightaway without moderation. I found Akismet most effective than CAPTCHA and Blacklist IPs. What are you people using?

Possible Code Injection Hack on my Site

Aakash — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:07:37 +0000

Recently, my site is put on warning by the Google. What I mean by put on warning is that when people search my site on Google, result lead to a warning page of Google instead of the targeted page of my site. The warning page of Google said that there is a badware/malware on my site. Google also suggest visiting stopbadware.org for more information. As shown in the pictures below

I have been experienced some delay in opening the home page, even sometime my I.E crashed. But I never thought that this could be due to some hack that had already taken over my website. It was only just two days, even before I could go deep into the details of error, When finally I got this mail from Google stating that they have identified my site as that one who distribute malware or badware. Now I found that some hack have happened to my site. It is trying to download some plug-in in background that is off course not from my domain. So I decided to redirect the user of my site to a maintenance page so that I can peep hard into the source code and do the cleaning stuff. Even I have tried deleting all blog entries and comments. But, I got no success finding malicious script/code. Luckily, I have taken the full backup of my site few days back. So I deleted all current pages and uploaded the backup. It works fine.

Anyway this is the time for me to act fast as traffic of site has taken a plunge. It has gone down by 90%. I fear that Google may drop my pages from its index. This is killing me in frustration. However, I have sorted out the problem but Google yet to do a review on my site. It is necessary to remove that nasty warning message. I have made a Review Request on Google and Stopbadware and keeping my finger crossed. I hope Google and Stopbadware will remove my site from their defaulter list.

Probably, this could be a code insertion hack, some third-party supplied advertising may contain links to badware, or the server hacks may have resulted in the insertion of code onto the site’s webpage.

Stopbadware.org published some security tips – http://stopbadware.org/home/security

StopBadware discussion group – http://groups.google.com/group/stopbadware