Moniker vs Platinax
Platinax is currently under sustained attack from a wave of automated blog comment spam, by what looks like one of the most aggressive amateurs I’ve ever had to deal with.
The automated comment spam is all promoting a raft of finance, pharma, and gambling affiliate sites registered - and hosted - with Moniker.com.
The size of the attacks is pretty surprising - so far it’s over 600 blog spam comments over just 4 days.
And that’s even after I’ve tried to block the IP’s used with every spam run.
God knows how many sites this amateur prat is targeting.
I expect to have to deal with a handful of blog spam comments everyday from a range of sources, but this is the second occasion when a blog spammer has tried to hit the site hard and heavy.
The first instance was easy to block - he was using IPs from only 3 different ranges, so I could block them all easily.
In the instance of the Moniker spammer, I’ve already manually blocked 145 IPs that he’s using, but the spam is still coming through, literally as I type, so I’m having to keep adding IPs to block.
To me this has gone way beyond automated blog comment spamming - this is effectively a DoS attack. And it’s wasting my time when I should be working.
Luckily, I’m also a customer at Moniker - so I’ve the email address of the company CEO, Monte Khan, who happens to be pretty approachable.
I’m currently trying to work out the issue with him - we’ve exchanged a couple of emails, and I’ve sent what information I can.
It’s times like this the GoDaddy abuse department doesn’t look so heavy handed at all.
ADDED: Monte Khan emailed back, stating that he’s addressed the issue - no comment spam has been sent since.
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Visited 3462 times, 4 so far today since July 24th 2007
That sounds like the same problem I’ve been having. Certainly a similar volume. I’ll be interested to see if mine stops as well.
Comment by Cheryl Morgan — May 22, 2006 @ 1:02 am
Cheryl, I pasted up the domains from Moniker here: Moniker spam domains.
If any of those look familiar, shoot me an email and I’ll try to help: brian at platinax.co.uk.
Comment by Administrator — May 22, 2006 @ 7:52 am
I recently got hit with some automation last week and some hand posts from (best I can tell) Indian SEOs so I made a little software change to stop it.
Putting a captcha in your comment page will stop the automation and slow down people doing it by hand.
To make it not worth their while to do by hand, I simply bounced all posts that contain HTML and URIs from first time posters and the problem went away.
Also, until someone has made a few worthwhile posts, don’t hyperlink their website under their name either.
Comment by IncrediBILL — June 4, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
Captchas are already on my to-do list for this week - both for the blog and the directory. :)
I hope when you finally develop your botclocker tool, you’ll consider blocking open proxies somehow as well - not just to stop the blog spamming, but also the referreral spamming.
Comment by Administrator — June 4, 2006 @ 6:56 pm
You must not have read my blog lately as I’ve been waging full scale nuclear war on proxies.
Believe it or not, I see more activity coming from cheap webhosting accounts and dedicated servers, check out my latest RED ALERT warnings #1-#5 which are hosting farms I’m blocking.
Comment by IncrediBILL — June 4, 2006 @ 7:35 pm
I had actually read a few posts from your blog earlier - I didn’t quite get around to that post - but any kind of automated update of proxies to your blocker could be a great idea.
It’s pretty scary to think how much traffic is bot driven - I figure a site that cleans out bots may be able to offer more valuable banner impressions for a start.
Comment by Administrator — June 4, 2006 @ 7:58 pm
Guess that depends on how you serve banners and when you count your banner impressions.
Most banner servers count the impression the minute the banner code is activated but that doesn’t imply the image has been physically delivered. Meaning, a crawler can activate the banner software yet never retreive the actual banner.
The banner impression should only be counted when the actual image is physically downloaded, not when the page is displayed or the banner requested.
This slight variation in accounting will vastly improve the accuracy of your stats as very few bots request images.
Comment by IncrediBILL — June 4, 2006 @ 8:18 pm
Good point about banners - I guess I’m thinking especially of traffic value for advertisers - at the moment a site can provide traffic figures, but there’s no way of gauging the traffic value. At least if bots and proxies can be reasonably filtered out then I figure that should at least provide a better idea of the actual human traffic.
I’m only just getting into stats analysis proper, so I guess I’m just playing with ideas here.
Comment by Administrator — June 5, 2006 @ 8:22 am
Moniker isn’t just the registrar they are the spammer. It’s their primary business and they are very aggressive about it.
Comment by Fred — February 15, 2008 @ 1:27 pm