29 Apr 2007 @ 16:05
Yesterday this blog was the victim of a spam attack. Strangely, somebody spammed thousands of blogs with nothing but the address to my blog here. It might have been a mistake, intending to promote some spammy site, or it might be an attempt to bother me personally, I don't know.
I noticed when the server suddenly had a huge load. It took me a while to figure out that it was because the blog front page here was getting 20-30 new accesses per second. And, as it needs to do database lookups and stuff, that's really too much.
What was going on was that somebody, from a distributed network of many machines on different ISPs, sent trackback notices to thousands of blogs. You know, trackback is meant as an automated way for one blog to notify another that it linked to it. But, since there's an enormous amount of spam sent out that way, many blog programs will then go back and verify if there really is a link to them at the blog mentioned, before they maybe will show it with the comments. So, essentially what I was getting was the mostly automated checkbacks from those anti-spam programs.
What was attempted to be posted on those sites was my URL, given as:
Site : http://Blog.metastreams.com/
and then the content:
Blog
Blog
.. which I suppose maybe was meant to contain some actual links to sites the spammers wanted to promote, but they forgot to include them.
Anyway, this is to let anybody know, who comes here checking in person, that I sure didn't do it, and I hope those guys won't do it again.
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