November 18, 2008First Spam In … Over a Year
Today I got my first spam that successfully navigated the Checkbox Challenge. It was caught by Akismet, which shows the power of a layered defense. On phpBB2 boards we have seen an increase in manual spam. Manual spam is really hard to defeat because it’s done by humans. On the other hand, it’s more expensive for the spammers too. I will be watching this closely to see how things trend over the next few months.
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Random. That’s my guess. It just happened by chance.
Comment by Dog Cow — November 19, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
For some reason that had not occurred to me. I’ll have to go back and look at the logs and see how many attempts were made from that IP address.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — November 19, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
It was my first thought, because you said some bots would check them all, not check any, or just check the wrong one.
Comment by Dog Cow — November 19, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
I don’t think I ever observed a bot checking the wrong box. They were very binary… they checked all of the boxes, or they skipped all of the boxes. But it could happen, I just haven’t looked at the log data lately. There’s a lot of log data.
Comment by Dave Rathbun — November 20, 2008 @ 3:09 pm
Well, it if turns out that it was by mistake, then I’ll write a bot to spam your blog. I’ve already got a WordPress bot, so it should be simple to add your checkbox “challenge” to it. >:->
Comment by Dog Cow — November 20, 2008 @ 5:39 pm
Anyway, if worst comes to the worst you could make your checkbox challenge a lot harder to crack by adding two more boxes and making two instead of one marked boxes obligatory.
Greetings.
Comment by dogs and things — December 2, 2008 @ 12:53 pm