Blog trouble?

[AndyT]

Grant:

I have had people tell me they are no longer getting update notifications from my HU blog. Naturally I tell them to sign up again, but then I started looking at the notification list periodically. One time there were 46 subscribers, next time 23, next time 109. At first I thought a bunch of new people subscribed after you mentioned me in the HU newsletter, but all the new subscribers have a yahoo.com domain, which I thought looked suspicous. It{s not causing me any trouble, just seems weird, any ideas?

[Grant Johnson]

Hi Andy,

Yeah - those are scumbag(s) spamming email addresses onto the blogs for some unknown reason - we have deleted thousands of them from the blog lists.

There are so many, and some are malformed, that it's causing problems with the mailing list database.

We're on it, but the only sure cure is to either turn off signups, or wait for the new sofware in progress - but it'll be a couple of months before it's ready - other stuff that it's dependent on comes first.

Up to you - I can disable signups entirely from your blog, or we can both keep deleting the obvious bs email addresses for now.

sorry for the hassle,

Grant

[AndyT]

I say unless it causes you problems, leave the sign up active. I don´t understand what anyone has to gain by signing up for blog updates, though.

[Grant Johnson]

ok - as above, I have no clue what they are trying to achieve, makes no sense.

If you can have a quick look through and delete the obvious ones before you send out a notification it would help - all the bounces come to me!

You might also want to do a backup of the list occasionally in case we have a real problem and it gets corrupted.

[Redboots]

Originally Posted by Grant Johnson

ok - as above, I have no clue what they are trying to achieve, makes no sense.

These children are trying to cause overload.
That is the sole aim of all this type of worm/virus/trojan, call them what you will, to generate traffic and so overload web sites or idealy, in their eyes, entire domains and networks.
You can easily get software that will do mass mailings... Sad little people.

John

[Grant Johnson]

of course - I forgot about them... giving too much credit, sigh...:confused1:

[AndyT]

The last couple of weeks there haven´t been any mysterious additions to my subscriber list. Did you do something, Grant, or did they just get bored?

[Grant Johnson]

I did lots actually! Blocked them at the server by their ip addresses. Looked a lot like they were trying to use the Movable Type software as a spam engine for them, but it didn't work, the software was too smart for that. Not smart enough to keep them from adding names, but since that's the purpose of the software, not too surprising!

At the height they were adding over a thousand names a day before we finally managed to block them completely.

And I also added a tweak to the software to make it harder for automated software to add names. They can still come back, but hopefully they've gone away to look for easier prey.

Keep me posted if you see anything odd in the future, thanks,

Grant