Thursday, March 16, 2006

Activity Update

I discovered that my blacklist mirror has been not working for a while. Not sure what happened, the subdomain just wasn't in the site config anymore, but it is back now.

Lately additions to the list have really slowed as has our wiki and my blog. Most of the other spam fighters I hang out with seem to be less active too. I brought this up among some of them and one suggested something like no news is good news. Could it be that web spammers aren't being as aggressive/stupid anymore? Or maybe Google's antispam measures have finally caught up with them. The only alternative I can think of is we have all been extra busy/lazy at the same time.

Even the idiots who keep spamming this blog have slowed again. I haven't actually compared over the long term but in the last 13 days I have only got 16 comment spams. But the first three days of March had 20 spams themselves. So I am pretty thankful for only 16 since then.

I know web spammers are still out there, while the rest of us have been less active on webspam, SplogFighter has been hammering away at splogs.

I have also been running a few experiments. The most interesting and only one that actually has been working was to see what would happen if I stopped cleaning spam from my honeypot wiki. I am still analyzing the data, but it is interesting so far. As it happens though, just before I decided to end the experiment and clean the spam it totally stopped. That makes me think it was all the work of one spammer, he must have refreshed his victim list. I guess it was a good time to stop the experiment since my only participant quit. I will try to get a post up on this soon.

Comments:
Spam to my WordPress blog has substantially increased this year. I've had 417 so far this month. On top of that, I received around 350 e-mails resulting from the activities of a guestbook spammer who used my name and e-mail address for his spam campaign. So, it's far from being quiet here!
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spam all round is down for me.

Combinations of spamvampire (on dorank for makeing such a nice effort to find websites I work on) and carefull reg-ex means that the ultra-lazy fail to make it to the publish stage.
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