Attacked

A particularly nasty TrackBack spam attack took out The Aardvark Cooks and The Evil Empire on Saturday. What's interesting is that the attack came in two waves: first, there was a small attack on Wednesday with about 4 Trackback spams each, which contained only random characters (and hence nonexistent URLs), and then a massive attack of over 200 pings on Saturday, for a porn site. The attack was in fact so massive that I had to take the sites offline to clean things up.

What's slightly disquieting is that they attacked my two smaller weblogs, but not this one. As a precautionary measure I have installed MT-Blacklist and hope this will help against future attacks, but I fear it'll only be a matter of time until they can bypass that, too — the random characters that were sent first might have something to do with that. Also, each of the 200 spam pings seemed to come from a different IP address, so they're either spoofing IP addresses or they're now using viruses for this kind of thing, too.

Somehow I don't think Professor Kari's prediction that the Internet will collapse within the next two years is all that far-fetched.