Trackback Attack

Posted by dr.k on Sunday, December 18, 2005 · 1 Comment 

Starting from December 8, this site has received over 400 phony trackbacks from 60 assorted referrers. It appears that someone is testing yet another spam client. The ip address varies, with one or two hits from the same ip with the same referrer, and 5-7 hits per referrer. Probably a network of zombied clients controlled over IRC.
Many of the referrers are for older, archived blog postings. Why would a blog article posted in July submit a trackback ping in December? It wouldn’t, of course, because this is just another attempt at spam.
I am also getting attempts to POST trackbacks for Drupal and whatever package uses the file “xmlrpc.php”.

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Comments

One Response to “Trackback Attack”
  1. Cyrris says:
    December 19, 2005 at 5:21 am

    The only blog software I know that uses the file called xmlrpc.php is Wordpress. I run a wordpress blog and used to get a ton of comment spam and referral spam, but now I use a plugin called “Bad Behavior”, which identifies most spam bots and prevents them from accessing your site – so it stops comment spam, referral spam, trackback spam, the lot.
    It was made for WordPress but it can probably be installed here too, as lots of other systems such as Drupal and Geeklog have had it ported over.
    I highly recommend it.