Getting spammed, almost to the DDOS point.

In the last eight hours, there have been 2404 attempts to post spam comments to this blog. Ooops, 2407. The count keeps going up, with between three and ten attempts per minute, sustained over the last eight hours. It looks like they are all generated from the same script, running on several machines.

Of course my system, using both Spam Karma 2 and the Akismet plugin for it, has blocked all of these things automatically without me needing to do anything, but damn that’s using up an annoying amount of bandwidth pointlessly. And it’s making my blog really slow to respond.

UPDATE: During the time it took to write those two paragraphs, there have been 38 more attempted spams. Man!

UPDATE 2: During the 90 minutes since I last updated this, there have been 109 more. I wonder what I did to get targeted for this particular attack. They obviously aren’t checking to see if there are any results since none of the spams are getting through.

UPDATE 3: The hits keep coming, with nearly another 400 spam attempts throughout the day.

UPDATE 4: Another 637 attempts over the past six hours. Surely at some point they’ll move on to another site??

UPDATE 5: Another 900+ attempts over the past seven hours. This attack now represents something like 15% of all the spam ever at this site. And climbing.

UPDATE 6: Another 541 more attempts over the past six hours. If this keeps up for another day this attack will represent more than half the spam attempts in the last year.

UPDATE 7: Another 600 more attempts over the past few hours. Will it ever end??

UPDATE 8: Two days later, things seem to be drying up and returning to the normal 30-50 a day spam attempts level. I wonder what that was all about.