Tackling the Spam

I wish I had more updates to post right now. Unfortunately, our servers are being taxed by spammers… this is a painful form of a DDoS attack, despite the goal not being to deny access to the site.

See, spam bots today have gotten crazy in terms of utilization. Thanks to viruses, spammers can upload these bots on computers, and then consume all idle bandwidth on hundreds… thousands of computers at once.

I’m sure many of you that read this blog understand the nature of spammers using this method already. However, we’re being hit hard by it. None of the spam is actually making it through to being display. However, to try to post the spam, spammers hammer the site constantly using automated web browsers.

While this is great for artificially inflating traffic numbers, it’s not great for keeping a server optimized. So, on top of accounting and day-to-day business, we’re undergoing an audit of all high-bandwidth IPs to filter them out. This will hopefully reduce CPU load.

Nothing’s anywhere near emergency-status on this, but that’s why we’re working on it now… so that the pages keep on loading for you the viewer.

A great new tool that’s helping us out is Project Honey Pot, which we’ll be signing on to as soon as they get back online with the IP monitors. While their main services are still offline for tracking spammers by IP, their existing database is cached online, and we’re going through and spotting those spammers quickly.