While I feel that it might appear unfair to do so, I have had to put country-wide IP blocks on this server due to the unusually high and annoying levels of spam received by bots and the like. While blocking by IP address or whole blocks is trivial to implement in Apache, I debated doing so for any real human readers out there.
After doing an extensive analysis of about a year’s worth of traffic, it was determined that the bulk of the spambots were coming from the following countries, with China being the worst offender of them all:
- China
- Hong Kong
- India
- Pakistan
- Japan
- Korea (including Yahoo-Korea, a well-known home to many a spammer for their free e-mail service)
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Singapore
- Taiwan
- Vietnam
No doubt there is a pattern there, one that I wish I could avoid. However, it is quite apparent that until these countries get their acts together, they will be blocked from this site. I hate censorship as much as any other writer out there, but I draw the line when spambots and hijackers think they own something you pay for and develop on your own.
After the block was put into place a few weeks ago there was a dip in traffic, but for the most part now there has been relatively little, if any, spam coming through on the blog. And Akismet, wonder of wonders, catches them handily.
Security is a multi-layered animal. No doubt at some point the spammers will find a way around this method of blocking at the server level, and those of us on the white hat team will continue to come up with new ways of dealing with it. For form bots, the combination honeypot/negative CAPTCHA system has produced 0% false positives and managed to trap and keep out bots for the time being. Given that it is a constantly mutating system that is (theoretically) impossible to synchronize with, I highly recommend that approach, even though it might mean a little more programming time. The headaches you save yourself from later will be worth it.
