Site under attack from SPAMBots

These things are supposed to happen only to others. My website has been harvested and is now under attack from SPAMBots. I don't know how and why they are doing this to my website. I know SPAM is bad, but this is like totally vile. Every day, the SPAMBot visits my website and enters comments with links to adult / porn websites to entries in my weblog. I have to then go in and delete those entries one by one. While doing that, I accidently deleted one of the legitimate comments from one of my friends. It's becoming to be a nuisance and a problem.

On researching I found out that spambots are quoting directly from Wikipedia

"A spambot is a program designed to collect e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. A spambot is a type of web crawler, that can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations. Because e-mail addresses have a distinctive format, spambots are easy to write.

A number of legislators in the U.S. are reported to be devising laws that would outlaw the spambot. A number of programs and approaches have been devised to foil spambots. One such technique is known as address munging, in which an e-mail address is deliberately modified so that a human reader (and/or human-controlled Web browser) can decode it but a spambot cannot. This has led to the evolution of sophisticated spambots that can recover e-mail addresses from character strings that appear to be munged.

The term spambot is sometimes used in reference to a program designed to prevent spam from reaching the subscribers of an Internet service provider (ISP). Such programs are more often called e-mail blockers or filters. Occasionally, such a blocker may inadvertently prevent a legitimate e-mail message from reaching a subscriber. This can be prevented by allowing each subscriber to generate a whitelist, or a list of specific e-mail addresses the blocker should let pass.

Another type of spambot surfs the web, looking for forms to submit, and it submits spam e-mails to these web forms, often with OCR technology to bypass any CAPTCHAs."

Thinking back to events / changes I did to my website, the only thing I did was to register my weblog into blogsoldiers. After that this menace has started. I have some thoughts / ideas to block the SPAMBots originating from my research on how to block them which I will be implementing soon. Till then I guess I will have to live with this.

If anyone has any ideas on how to combat this threat, please drop me a line.