spam Archives - Sysadmins of the North

Disable Joomla Contacts component (com_contact) in MySQL / phpMyAdmin

MySQL / By Jan Reilink / 5 January 2021 6 January 2021

How-to disable Joomla’s built-in contact forms component and its ability to send a copy to the sender, directly in your MySQL database using phpMyAdmin

Often the built-in Joomla contact forms component (com_contact) is abused by spammers. These contact forms allow the sender to receive a copy of the form contents. All spammers need to do is enter the email address of the target as sender/from. This way, anyone can use the Joomla contact form for spamming anyone. This short article explains how to disable and combat this.

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Delete spam comments after three (3) days

WordPress / By Jan Reilink / 9 December 2019 24 June 2020

Here is how to change Akismet interval to three days instead of 15 days for deleting spam comments using the akismet_delete_comment_interval filter.

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Remove Jetpack email sharing service

WordPress / By Jan Reilink / 19 May 2017 16 June 2020

Recently the WordPress Jetpack email sharing service is often abused by spammers. They use the Send to Email Address for sending spam. All these kind of “Tell a Friend” scripts are abused a lot. Here is how to disable email share service in Jetpack.

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PowerShell blacklist check script: find an IP address’ blacklist status & reputation

PowerShell / By Jan Reilink / 19 May 2016 18 April 2021

Here’s a blacklist check script written in PowerShell. You can use this to lookup an IP address in various blacklists (DNSBL, RBL). Such a check is a great indicator for an IP address’ reputation. Basically this PowerShell blacklist checker is a port of my Bash script to check an IP address blacklist status in Linux.

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Clean-up WordPress spam comments and meta data

WordPress / By Jan Reilink / 23 April 2014 6 January 2021

How to delete WordPress spam comments and meta data with phpMyAdmin. A lot of WordPress spam comments and meta data will keep your WordPress database huge, and slows down your site. It’s best to delete spam comments regularly, but if you’re facing hundreds of thousands spam comments, here is how to delete them all in bulk

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Block WordPress comment spammers manually

WordPress / By Jan Reilink / 30 November 2013 19 January 2021

The less spammers hit your WordPress blog, the better your blog performs, is one of my opinions. A second is, the less unnecessary plugins you use on your WordPress blog, the better. So, a little while ago I decided to remove plugins like Stop Spammer Registration Plugin and do its work myself. Here is why & how:

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Check IP address blacklist status in Bash

GNU Linux / By Jan Reilink / 14 October 2011 11 May 2020

Here is a Linux Bash shell script to check whether an IP address is listed in a DNSBL blacklist, or RBL. This is a modified version of a by J65nko posted Bash script to check an IP address reputation status in several blacklists. I’ve added HttpBl as backlist and an API key is required for this list. Using this script in Bash you can quickly test if an IP address is blacklisted.

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