Webloggin Last Week, Hosting Matters This Week - Another CyberAttack on Blogs

Michelle Malkin is reporting that Hosting Matters is experiencing another outage from a CyberAttack on their blogs. Last week I suffered an attack on my servers and had to take drastic measures to stop the creeps. Despite my best efforts they managed to take my servers down on three separate occasions.

One of the blogs I host had 50,000 spam related comments before I could get to it. I eventually managed to block the spammers using some fairly complicated .htaccess file rules.

It is important to realize that WordPress plugins such as Spam Karma and Akismet DO NOT reduce the load on your servers. You are still taking a hit on the server, chewing up unnecessary bandwidth and filling your database up with comment spam even though it doesn’t show up on your blog pages.

Web hosts should scrupulously watch your server logs to identify and stop access by spammers and hackers. The most drastic measures involve blocking IP’s while it may be possible to block referrers with less harmful effect.

In my estimation the blog model is in serious danger of collapsing in on itself. Too many people do not understand the technologies behind blogs, syndication feeds and web hosting. Worse, services like blogrolling and many of the blogad servers out there are not scaling properly and do not have redundant backups. Blogrolling has been one of the worst culprits in my estimation.

In any event it is important to block these people before they hit your blog and not after. This means they need to be blocked at the server level.

I have implemented .htaccess blocking and it has worked for the most part. That is until they find another way around my defenses and then it will be back to the drawing board.