On 13 January 2011 we posted some information on our Spam Monitoring Service that was helping to block the huge amount of spam accounts hitting communities all over the web.
There's not much new to report - spam will always exist unfortunately - but we thought everyone would be interested to know that we were recently able to block huge ranges of attacking IP addresses.
IPS has a hosting division that provides managed community hosting for many thousands of communities. We host everyone from small, hobby sites to large enterprise clients with thousands of online users. We manage our own network and hardware to have the best possible control over the experience we can offer our clients.
We have been able to leverage our hosted network of thousands of communities to detect the signatures that the spammers were using to get past the various defenses in IP.Board. The spammers were using automated software to, for lack of a better term, brute-force their way past the reCAPTCHA service and this program left clear marks in our server logs because of the unique way it accessed the servers. Our network staff were able to, across our dozens of servers, gather up all the IP addresses used to register spam accounts and add those to the block-list on the Spam Monitoring Service.
While this is not a complete solution we were very happy to be able to detect these trends and block those spammers at the service level so the knowledge we gained from our own network could be applied to help all those with an active IP.Board license.
Fighting spam is an ongoing battle of course but we will continue to do our best to help blocking those who would try to disrupt your community. The better your community runs the better IPS grows and we take our responsibility to your community seriously.