A Plague of Automated Comment Spammers
17 March 2006 11:37 AM | Peeves and Irritations
It's amazing how automated comment spammers and their bots work. One of my directories gets mass waves of bots all trying to spam the comments for the listings.

Here are their footprints:

83.240.17.162
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Mac_PowerPC)

203.113.146.250
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0; NetCaptor 6.5.0RC1)

216.93.179.108
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iRider 2.21.1108; FDM)

69.243.42.205
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

222.118.167.142
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 5.11 [en]

202.38.52.5
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; KITV4.7 Wanadoo)

200.123.131.181
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 3.0)

62.183.50.164
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)

201.6.226.173
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Maxthon)

211.152.35.23
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)

They appear to be randomizing the IP and User Agent. All are hitting only the comments area of the listings in swarms 6 or more times a day. I'll bet half my bandwidth is going to these guys.

Link popularity and PageRank have become such a holy grail commodity that it's all now just zombie hoards of spam bots roaming the web looking for any form field to spam.

So this is what the web has come too?
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