Presumably all bloggers will be to some extent familiar with the bane that is spam.

Thanks to a few little bits an bobs set up when this site was in it’s infancy as good as no comment spam has managed to make its way onto the site.

However, the last month or so has seen a distinct upsurge targeting my contact section meaning that for the first time I actually have a few spammy e-mail’s in my inbox.

This isn’t appreciated but from my own perspective, the nature of the spam is quite interesting.

Not your common old comment spam from (insert well known spamming server), nope, this is a full on botnet scenario. Not exactly an outright DNS attack but certainly one utilising plenty of zombie PC’s (all running Windows and Internet Explorer I might add). Quite why my site and Mrs Penguin’s have become the target of a botnet is not known, other sites linking to here who use exactly the same CMS structure haven’t been affected but there you go, must have miffed off some Russians or Chinese. (note, that’s a qualified statement as most of the worlds botnet attacks originate from either of those two countries and is no way to be considered a slur on wither nationalities).

It’s a bit of a problem and vast swathes of IP addresses have been blocked. Sadly these will be to real people who then will not be able to access the site (although they’ll get a polite message and instructions on how to contact me to rectify the problem).

I just thought I’d mention it.

In a similar vein, one particular IP address has been popping up very regularly, every ten minutes to be precise and it’s from FastHosts. Not exactly my favourite company given their policy of rolling over to rich people with well paid lawyers so they’ve been blocked too. In all likelihood it is some sort of aggregating website such as the the copious number of political feed sites that seem to be everywhere these days. I haven’t got a problem usually, the porting of content across the net is fundamental to the direction in which it is going but I’m sorry, every ten minutes is taking the piss. Not even Google pop by that often so whoever it is can hop it.