Brennan’s Blog

Over the last couple of weeks one of my servers became sluggish and the web server became completely unresponsive. Initially I saw the Spam Assassin process was chewing up the processor. Today I saw that a distributed attack was hitting my WordPress installation as spam comments were immediately deleted by Spam Karma. The server status was showing various IP addresses hitting the comments post page which would max out the number connections I allow for the web server. To overcome these attacks I am trying out the Apache DoS Evasive Maneuvers Module which manages an automatic blacklist which will stop these frequent hits from these remote servers. I have also limited the Spam Assassin service which should make it much less likely to allow it to be the resource hog it has been lately.

It seems spam is getting worse. Perhaps the spammers really are getting more and more desperate now that their window of opportunity is closing. After all, Vista will soon be out for the general public and more and more people are choosing Macs. I have a copy of Vista installed into a Virtual PC and the Least Privilege User Mode did not really get in my way too much so I may not disable it as some may do. If most people keep it in place it will definitely help stop those sneaky exploits which turn broadband connected Windows computers into spam sending zombies. Add these contributing factors together and you can almost see a future without malware. But before that happens, we still need to change the way email works.

Other technologies and protocols like Gopher and BBS became overshadowed by a better solution. How has email stayed around so long even though we have known for years that the current protocol is fundamentally broken? When will Instant Messages, TXT Messaging and RSS-related solutions replace email entirely?