Comment spam

Three weeks ago, I slightly modified the comment system on this blog for an experiment. This blog is a standard wordpress installation. Comments are normally directed to the wp-comments-post.php script by the HTML form. What I did is:

  • Create a comments-post.php wrapper script that just includes wp-comments-post.php (this allows things to still work properly after wordpress upgrades),
  • Make the HTML form direct to a comments-post.php script,
  • Add a usedForm=1 parameter to the HTML form action, such that comments-post.php is supposed to always be called with it,
  • Add a simple javascript that adds a hasJS=1 parameter to the HTML form action when the page is loaded, and a Submit=1 parameter when the form is submitted.

During the past three weeks, on this blog, there were 7170 comments, 8 of which were actual comments. 7162 were spam (~99.9%).

  • 3165 spams (~44.1%) were sent to the original WordPress comment handler (wp-comments-post.php) from 1589 unique IP addresses.
  • 0 spam were sent to the new comment handler without a query string (comments-post.php), but 1 was sent with an empty query string (comments-post.php?).
  • 18 spams were sent to the new comment handler with a lowercased query string (comments-post.php?usedform=1) from 6 unique IP addresses.
  • 3971 spams (~55.4%) were sent to the new comment handler with the form query string (comments-post.php?usedForm=1) from 1153 unique IP addresses.
  • 7 spams (~0.1%) were sent to the new comment handler with the full query string, including what is added through javascript (comments-post.php?usedForm=1&hasJS=1&Submit=1) from 5 unique IP addresses.

This means a large portion of spammers didn't care about actually checking the comment forms and used the standard wordpress url, and another large portion don't run javascript on their bots, although a very few do.

2012-07-15 11:35:54+0900

p.d.o, p.m.o, website

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Comment spam”

  1. ArrowSIVAC Says:

    I have been trolling for a user forum for making a post on this but did not find anything (active). As such maybe you can point me in the correct direction, or provide some ideas….

    ****************

    We have a lab, one of the more junior admins had a vSphere 4 farm. Took a vmfs v3 volume, single 300GB partition, and extended it via the iSCSI SAN controller to 2TB. This of course orphaned the vSphere 4 hosts from mounting the volume. I am trying to recover the data off the volume and move it onto a new VMFS 5 volume (had him upgrade his systems to vSphere 5). I was able to recover the first VM, but subsequent VMs have certain files which will not copy. The shell seems to “hang” with zero bytes transferred.

    Steps:
    1) Ubuntu VM with two virtual disks. One OS, One mounted for repository which will later be exported as NFS for the vSPhere 5 systems to mount.
    2) Mount original vmfs3 volume via iSCSI and run a basic cp command to transfer the files from the vmfs3 volume to the local formatted virtual disk which is exported via NFS.
    3) Via network, transfer from “NFS” volume that the new vSphere host mounts, to the new VMFS5 volume.

    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# dpkg -s vmfs-tools
    Package: vmfs-tools
    Status: install ok installed
    Priority: extra
    Section: otherosfs
    Installed-Size: 232
    Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers
    Architecture: amd64
    Version: 0.2.1-1
    Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7), libfuse2 (>= 2.8.1), libuuid1 (>= 2.16)
    Description: Tools to access VMFS filesystems
    VMFS is a clustered filesystem designed to store virtual machine disks for
    VMware ESX or ESXi Server hosts. This set of tools allows to access these
    filesystems from some other non ESX/ESXi host for e.g. maintenance tasks.
    .
    Only read access is available at the moment, but write access is under
    works. Multiple extents are supported.
    .
    The VMFS can be accessed with a command line tool or mounted through a
    userspace filesystem (FUSE-based).
    Original-Maintainer: Mike Hommey glandium@debian.org
    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# mount
    …
    /dev/fuse on /media/vmfs type fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,default_permissions)
    /dev/sdb1 on /media/floppy0 type ext3 (rw)

    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# exportfs
    /media/floppy0 *.*
    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# ls -alh /media/vmfs/hpdc02/
    total 0
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2.8K Mar 8 13:50 .
    drwxr-xr-t 36 root root 5.7K Jun 29 11:10 ..
    -rw——- 1 root root 2.2G Jul 7 19:46 hpdc02-000001-delta.vmdk
    -rw——- 1 root root 321 Feb 8 2012 hpdc02-000001.vmdk
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 37 Mar 8 13:50 hpdc02-606787e8.hlog
    -rw——- 1 root root 4.0G Jul 7 15:46 hpdc02-606787e8.vswp
    -rw——- 1 root root 35G Feb 8 2012 hpdc02-flat.vmdk
    -rw——- 1 root root 8.5K Apr 26 10:15 hpdc02.nvram
    -rw——- 1 root root 4.1G Feb 8 2012 hpdc02-Snapshot1.vmsn
    -rw——- 1 root root 522 Dec 17 2010 hpdc02.vmdk
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 422 Feb 8 2012 hpdc02.vmsd
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.2K May 4 10:59 hpdc02.vmx
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 261 Dec 28 2011 hpdc02.vmxf
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 137K Jul 11 2011 vmware-30.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 60K Jul 11 2011 vmware-31.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 130K Aug 23 2011 vmware-32.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 128K Oct 11 2011 vmware-33.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 128K Dec 5 2011 vmware-34.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 324K Mar 2 14:33 vmware-35.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 205K May 11 11:31 vmware.log
    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# ls -alh /media/floppy0/hpdc02/
    total 14G
    drwx—— 2 root root 4.0K Aug 23 13:29 .
    drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Aug 30 11:20 ..
    -rw——- 1 root root 0 Aug 23 11:59 hpdc02-000001-delta.vmdk
    -rw——- 1 root root 321 Feb 8 2012 hpdc02-000001.vmdk
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 37 Mar 8 13:50 hpdc02-606787e8.hlog
    -rw——- 1 root root 128K Aug 23 12:59 hpdc02-606787e8.vswp
    -rw——- 1 root root 35G Feb 8 2012 hpdc02-flat.vmdk
    -rw——- 1 root root 8.5K Apr 26 10:15 hpdc02.nvram
    -rw——- 1 root root 0 Aug 23 13:23 hpdc02-Snapshot1.vmsn
    -rw——- 1 root root 522 Dec 17 2010 hpdc02.vmdk
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 422 Feb 8 2012 hpdc02.vmsd
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.2K May 4 10:59 hpdc02.vmx
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 261 Dec 28 2011 hpdc02.vmxf
    -rw——- 1 root root 0 Aug 23 13:29 vmware.log
    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5#
    root@ubuntu12:/home/ibm/vmfs-tools-0.2.5# cd /media/
    root@ubuntu12:/media# ls
    cdrom floppy0 hp nfs vmfs
    root@ubuntu12:/media# chmod 770 /media/vmfs/hpdc02/vmware.log
    root@ubuntu12:/media# ls -alh /media/vmfs/hpdc02/vmware.log
    -rw-r–r– 1 root root 205K May 11 11:31 /media/vmfs/hpdc02/vmware.log

    root@ubuntu12:/media#
    root@ubuntu12:/media# cp -a /media/vmfs/hpdc02/vmware.log /media/floppy0/hpdc02/

    <>> Review via other shell below.
    Before Shell cp command started After / During (as shell becomes orphaned)
    root@ubuntu12:~# df
    Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/mapper/ubuntu12-root 15400892 1322480 13305704 10% /
    udev 500692 4 500688 1% /dev
    tmpfs 203900 248 203652 1% /run
    none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
    none 509748 0 509748 0% /run/shm
    /dev/sda1 233191 24965 195785 12% /boot
    /dev/fuse 1610350592 825751552 784599040 52% /media/vmfs
    /dev/sdb1 309633052 29085696 264818920 10% /media/floppy0
    root@ubuntu12:~# root@ubuntu12:~# df
    Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/mapper/ubuntu12-root 15400892 1322480 13305704 10% /
    udev 500692 4 500688 1% /dev
    tmpfs 203900 248 203652 1% /run
    none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
    none 509748 0 509748 0% /run/shm
    /dev/sda1 233191 24965 195785 12% /boot
    /dev/fuse 1610350592 825751552 784599040 52% /media/vmfs
    /dev/sdb1 309633052 29085696 264818920 10% /media/floppy0
    root@ubuntu12:~#

    (( bytes do not change so shell seems to be in some kind of unknown state))

    Are there any tools or ideas on how to further debug this so I can recover these files. Obviously without these files, I cannot recover the VM(s).

    Thanks,