Living in a state of accord.
I'm Adrian Sutton, otherwise known as AJ.
I'm the CTO at Ephox, coming to grips with what that means and how to do it. I've recently moved over to the UK to help increase Ephox's presence in Europe. You can follow my travel stories at "The Suttons".
In my spare time I'm busy exploring the sights of the UK and Europe.
Contact:
adrian@symphonious.net
+44 7 525 806 170
+1 (650) 292 9659 x717
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There's a very persistent (and very stupid) referrer spammer pummelling my blog and I'm getting sick of it - not least of all because at one point it actually managed to completely overwhelm the tiny little virtual server my blog runs on so that nothing else could access it. Given that I'm using WordPress with Apache, what's the easiest way to block it?
April 1st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
I don’t know exactly how to handle referrer spam, but I do know how to spot a spam url.
Given any url, for example, http://hostname.example.com/foo/bar/baz.html
take hostname.example.com, and append .multi.surbl.org to it. Then do a DNS lookup on it, i.e. “hostname.example.com.multi.surbl.org”. if the query comes back with an ip address, (it will be 127.0.0.XX, where XX will change according to the blacklists that list that hostname) then it is spam. Remove elements from the hostname until you’re left with nothing but the root (.com, .cx, .com.au, etc, there’s a list of them on surbl.org for you convenience).
As for how to make apache drop HTTP connections based on the referrer, I don’t know how to do that, but it would be a fun mod_anti_spam. ;)
Heck, you could probably use the same technique to stop comment spam, if you inspect the HTTP GET/POST data as well as the Referrer: header…