Most Common Trackback Spammerbandwidth misery

If you used the latest version of WP-iStalker theme it will show you the client’s user-agent for sending trackback and pingback. The small signature is display on the comment list & Akismet.

I actually made this little feature for separating WordPress client pingback and trackback comments. I’m positive that you can also used it for comparing real trackback from spammer.

Most shell bots used perl http package

Here come the stats

According to my made-in-france bot tracker, libwww-perl is the most abused clients for sending code injection and Jakarta Commons-HttpClient is largely used for sending trackback SPAM.

90% are trackbacks spam

Simple rules

User agent string can be easily spoof so the target victim wont know the actual client. If the client is not coming from a blogging software or CMS its 90% spam oriented. And if the client is using generic user agent software HTTP package likes libwww-perl, Larbin, Nutch, et cetera it should be ignore.

How to banned user agent with htaccess

Banning these two user agents reduces my daily trackback spams to bearable amount. I’m gladly say these two user agent is the cause of many bandwidth misery. Both client is now honored in my htaccess rules ↓

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^libwww-perl*" shell_bots=1
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Jakarta*" shell_bots=1
</IfModule>

<FilesMatch "(.*)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=shell_bots
</FilesMatch>