I hate spammers
Until yesterday spam comments were little annoying disturbance, which was mainly taken care by Spam Karma. However yesterday I discover a new level of harm caused by spammers. It started with an e-mail I received complaining that my blog is down, when check with my blog host I received the following answer:
Your blog was actually receiving so much traffic that it was causing the Apache service to stop. We have temporarily disabled your site for the sake of the other blogs on the server. If you anticipate receiving the amount of traffic you have been getting lately, please consider upgrading to a VPS plan which can handle much more traffic
After being complimented for a second that my blog generate so much traffic I realized that it isn’t because of my brilliant writing but has to be something else. Further discussion with the blog host, and several hours of work of the support team expose the real root cause:
I have been looking into the situation with your site. Our Infrastructure team did identify your site as the cause of the issues we had on the server today, which was caused by a large spike of traffic generated to your site. I took a look at your logs, and I found that there was indeed a relatively small number of records in your logs, however they are all from between 5:50 pm and 6:30 pm EDT this evening, right when we were having our server issue.
Further investigation of these hits show that almost all of them have referrer links from a single domain, (removed by me). The links are from different pages on this site, and if you were to browse to those pages they would immediately redirect you to other online casino sites, they do not actually exist. It is my belief that they were likely spoofed or faked referrers, and that the incident was either an automated spamming application that was attempting to make posts on your blog, or a Denial of Service attack directed at your site.
The results of yesterdays attack: blog down for several hours, my frustration and the support team few hours of work. At this point I don’t know how to efficiently and dynamically block these guys when they will change domains.
Technorati Tags: spam - spam-karma - traffic