I am running my ip range code against the Stop Forum Spam ip list for the last 90 days. I am learning a little bit about who is sending comment spam to blogs.
I’ve been lucky and I am down quite a bit as to the spam load on my site. I have not had to deal with spam that mad it past my plugins for a while, but I find there are constantly new IP ranges that needed to be added to my block lists. That’s why I am buzzing the SFS list.
There are countries that nearly every IP range in the country has at least one spammer. Since I am blocking entire CIDRs, it turns out that I would save time by blocking entire countries.
Vietnam needs to be blocked. The data shows that a great many cell phones in country code VN are engaged in clicking on comments. I wish that I had kept counts, but a great deal of spam is originating from Vietnam.
My sites don’t see much comment spam. I think that the Stop Spammer plugin has resulted in most robots getting a 403 denied message when they hit my site so even the click farms no longer try. My big problem is hack attempts, and I have been concentrating on malicious login or SQL injection attempts because the comment spam seems to be less of a problem.
The Vietnam clicks all appear to be comment spam done by hand. I guess they get some payment for verified comments. (Ever notice that spam messages have a random string somewhere?).
As I finished the data buzz I noticed that almost entire country of Vietnam is now blocked.
India, Bahrain, and Surinam also seem to have much of their cellphone ips blocked.
I was going to try to whitelist residential telephone networks, but that will be impossible. I have to block the entire country of Vietnam from accessing my site.
I am also going to block the entire country of China. There seems to be no legitimate traffic at all from China. All if it is spam along with an incredible amount of malicious attacks on my sites.