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.).