Friday, October 13, 2006

Bot Busting or Spam Hunting?

Since I made a few posts about spam lately, mostly web spam, it seems I have a few spammers all bent and other people thinking that I'm a spam hunter.

For starters, I'm a bot buster and not a spam hunter. Whether it's a scraper, a stealth crawler, or a spambot, they're all bots so anything that malicious bots do to my sites that need to be stopped will be of interest to me. Defeating a bot that scrapes or spams each has it's own challenges and it's not been too terribly hard to stop them either way, so far.

Spam Hunter?

Get real, who has to hunt spam?

I just sit here minding my own business and spam comes from every angle via email, online submission forms, blog comments, or anything else you can put online and they'll spam it. When I see a trend emerging in my own spam logs, like the recent wiki/tiki and phpBB abuse, I just look to see how deep the problem is which isn't hunting spam exacly, it's analyzing the trends and patterns of the software vulnerabilities that are being exploited.

Maybe someone will notice and close some of those exploits, wouldn't that be nice, unless you use those exploits...

Just because a few of the latest topics revolve around spam, it's still bots in action and bots I've automatically blocked and logged, just spambots is all, but still bots all the same.

Enough of this noise, back to busting bots, scraper, spam or otherwise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't give a damn about spammer's blathering. There's always someone who easily loses orientation as soon as there's no suitable label he/she can stick on another one's forehead ;-)

Spammers just don't seem to grasp that they're not only unwanted by spam hunt(ers|ress), but also by the majority of average website owners. They conclude that a lack of complaints automagically signifies agreement to their actions and those who do complain must be spam hunt(ers|ress).

Anonymous said...

I found it interesting that as soon as I started talking about spam, and bots, my incidents increased 10 fold. I decided to go another route and change the code to affect the attack vector. Now, no more spam :>

They are watching, and very sensitve about thier spam for some reason.



Doug