2

I'm getting hammered by spam requests. I allow guest comments that require pending and got over 20,000 of them in a very short space of time. 99% are from Ukraine or China. To bypass this I have used my .htaccess file to completely block all IPs from China, Ukraine and Russia. The problem I have now is that these IPs also seem to be blocking users from Italy and I've seen a few blocked IPs from France.

The IP getting blocked is not in my .htaccess file. There are a few rules that block IPs within a range, but the IPs that are getting blocked arent even in the first 3 blocks.

e.g. The ip getting blocked might be 123.123.321.321. There are no IPs in my .htaccess file that start with 123.123.321, so I don't see why these are getting blocked. I ran some tools and have confirmed (using proxys) that at least Italy is getting blocked.

I am worried now that if I were able to find 2 blocked countries in a few hours, how many others are being blocked.

What's the best way around this?

I ran a test using http://cloudmonitor.ca.com/en/checkit.php All passed except for Padova and Hong Kong which both got access denied. The IP range for Italy should be this

94.124.34.0/24

http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/94.124.34.0-94.124.34.255. The closest match in my .htaccess file is this

94.124.0.0/20 94.124.16.0/21

There shouldn't be a conflict here, so I'm really confused

Improve this question
1
  • In order for us to troubleshoot this issue properly, please can you post the complete IP blocking rules/ranges, and then also the IP addresses you say are being blocked but that shouldn't be. Thank you.
    – richhallstoke
    Commented Aug 21, 2015 at 11:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Spam is not new. But the only thing you can really do is install a captcha system. This means that for every post someone makes on your website, they have to enter a special code that is displayed on screen inside an image. Robots can't see this and since most spam comes from robots, you'll probably do a good job filtering out most robots. If some try to guess the code, then make some sort of lock down on your site so that if the code is incorrect after a certain number of attempts then the guest is banned from making further posts until a set time is passed.

Another thing you could try is email or phone verification per post. This means when a guest makes a post, they are sent an email or a text message with a link to a URL to go to in order to verify the identity.

Improve this answer
2
  • I actually have a chaptcha system in place and also have a honey pot system on the comments to back it up. What I mostly don't understand is how I am blocking European traffic when the ips aren't in the blocked list. I'm getting non stop attacks on the WordPress login even with protection. It's sucking up bandwidth
    – user1889580
    Commented Aug 19, 2015 at 19:57
  • If you can, move the wordpress login files to another location that you know and then create a special wordpress login file that spits maybe a sentence on the screen for the hackers. Then your bandwidth will be reduced
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Aug 19, 2015 at 20:04

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.