Tom Raftery’s Social Media

This morning I received a trackback spam. It pointed at a rubbish domain - ohuudfghj.com, and came from ip address 172.164.210.50 using User Agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90).

I took a look at Spamhuntress’ site and sure enough she has a post warning that a trackback spam run is about to get underway imminently.

Then I checked out my raw log files and found several entries from this User Agent, all from different IP addresses so banning the IP address would be useless to block the spam.

Consequently, I added the following line:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ^Mozilla\/4.0 \(compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90\) spammer=yes

to my .htaccess file.

Although this may seem a tad drastic, I trawled through my raw log files and couldn’t find any legitimate entry for that User Agent in my logs.

Be aware that if you intend to use this code, you need to use it in the context of the surrounding code in my .htaccess file (i.e. follow the code with

deny from env=spammer

if you are uncertain, be sure to check out my .htaccess file).

You can test the efficacy of this code by going to the Wannabrowser site, entering the User Agent into the HTTP User Agent field, your site’s address in the Location field and clicking the Load URl button. You should get a 403 result if the code is successfully blocking this User Agent.

UPDATE: Diane let me know that this code was too strict as it was blocking her and she isn’t on a Windows 98 PC. Spamhuntress pointed to a script to block access to Trackbacks - basically you use this script. I have been using the script and haven’t received any trackback spam since I installed it.