figby.com

Yesterday my wife and I dealt with a major trackback spam attack, and apparently we weren’t the only ones. Judging by the forum posts, this was a massive attack across at least hundreds of weblogs.

If you have a WordPress weblog, there’s a new plug-in that puts trackback pings into the moderation queue. Since trackbacks aren’t scanned by the built-in filtering system like comments, this is definitely needed. Most of us don’t get enough trackbacks to mind manually approving them.

Another possible solution is verifying the IP addresses of sites that send pings. This raises a couple of issues (such as sites like Blogger that might not ping from the same address as the weblog) but I think it’s worth pursuing.

One by one, the open, insecure systems of the past (email, weblog comments, trackback…) are being made useless by spammers. It’s going to be a messy place until a more secure alternative emerges.