From which CMS spam more often?

June 1, 2016

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The statistics are based on data from anti-spam service CleanTalk, for the period from April 2015 to March 2016. The analysis was conducted for the following CMS: WordPress, Joomla, 1C Bitrix, Drupal, phpBB3.0, phpBB3.1, IP.Board, SimpleMachines, MediaWiki.

The analysis was attended by all the POST requests processed by the service, such as comments, registration, contact forms, orders, feedback, and others.

The distribution of the main forms on the websites:

Comments 65.5% of sites
Registration 53%
Contacts 68.5%
Other 45%

Contact and comments 49%
Contact and registration 21%
Comments and registration 21%

Sites with:

1 form 23%
2 forms 34%
3 forms and more 41%

Distribution of spam attacks per day on one site, with the division at CMS

Top of CMS on spam attacks

CMS	The number of spam attacks
MediaWiki	657.92
Joomla	172.45
1C Bitrix	129.27
Drupal	118.14
IP.Board	98.70
WordPress	49.75
SimpleMachines	41.75
phpBB 3.1	27.51
phpBB 3.0	25.88
Average	146,82

As we can see, MediaWiki is very different from other CMS. In our opinion, such a substantial gap related to the fact that this CMS has no sufficiently effective means of protection and to track changes made in article for administrators is very difficult. This leads to the fact that it’s convenient for spammers place links in the articles.

The low proportion of spam on phpBB due to the rather low prevalence of this platform.

The number of blocked spam attacks for the period

Month	Anti-spam	SpamFireWall
April 2015	34,956,588	0
May 2015	39,269,843	0
June 2015	48,258,175	0
July 2015	51,081,673	0
August 2015	44,131,678	0
September 2015	50,954,715	0
October 2015	49,895,055	9,026,116
November 2015	46,807,047	17,129,574
December 2015	62,355,098	11,971,351
January 2016	54,720,390	17,540,442
February 2016	63,326,170	14,036,018
March 2016	67,676,972	13,710,624
April 2016	68,038,697	13,413,217

It should be noted that in October 2015, we launched SpamFireWall service, with a portion of spam attacks were blocked and they are not considered for the Anti-Spam service. It is also worth noting about SpamFireWall statistics as blocked not only POST requests, but all GET requests to the site.

As the graph shows, the amount of spam on web sites is only growing and has some seasonality. In the summer and autumn of spam growth stops or falls slightly, but with the onset of winter always starts growing.

The percentage of spam in the POST requests by CMS

CMS	% of spam
MediaWiki	99.76
WordPress	98.21
Drupal	96.08
SimpleMachines	95.74
IP.Board	91.72
Joomla	91.04
phpBB 3.1	90.35
1C Bitrix	82.03
phpBB 3.0	81.87
Average	91,87

Statistics shows that the proportion of spam in the comments/registration/contacts, etc. greater than 90%. In our opinion, the spammers find promotion links are still working effectively and if not to advance in the search, then to attract audiences to the site of its resources.

About the service CleanTalk

CleanTalk is a cloud service to protect websites from spam bots. CleanTalk uses protection methods that are invisible to the visitors of the website. This allows you to abandon the methods of protection that require the user to prove that he is a human (captcha, question-answer etc.).