SpamFireWall – prohibition of access to the site for spambots

Every owner of the website or the webmaster is faced with such a scourge as spam in the comments or contact forms, registration by spambots in the guise of users. As a result, the form in the website processes these messages, which spend resources on the server. Some spam bots load the page to bypass the anti-spam protection, because of what resources are spent even more. In small amounts it is imperceptible, but when the web site per day receives thousands of such requests, this may significantly affect the CPU load of the server.

Now we will tell you about a new option in the anti-spam plug-in for CleanTalk, which can effectively repel the attacks of spambots on your website. The option is called SpamFireWall (SFW), it blocks POST- and GET-requests from the most active spambots and does not allow them to download the server.

How it works

1. The user visits the website.
2. His IP-address is checked against a database that contains records about more than two million IP-addresses that belong to the spambots.
3. If the IP-address is contained in the database, the site displays a special page. Ordinary users will not notice anything, as the protection works in an invisible mode.
4. All information about the process is stored in the database and available in the dashboard.

The special page, which is displayed when suspected spam activity, not time-consuming for users who saw her by mistake. After 3 seconds, this user goes to the page automatically or sooner after clicking the link.

This blocks all HTTP/HTTPS-traffic from spam active IP-addresses. Thus, in addition to spam attacks, from these IP-addresses will no longer able to be carried out and other types of attacks on the websites: bruteforce, DDoS, SQL injection, scanning of site by spambots, referral spam, etc.

SpamFireWall allows users to configure their own “black lists” and allows you to add as a separate IP-address and a network.

Currently SpamFireWall available for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Bitrix, SMF, MediaWiki, IPS Community Suite. In addition, you can use API-method to get a list of spam-active network https://cleantalk.org/help/api-spam-check).

Logging requests SFW

All the queries that triggered the SFW option, are stored in a log and then available in the control dashboard.

In the statistics you can see the number of blocked requests as well as requests that have been blocked, but went to the site. At this point in the base SFW is 3.22 million IP-addresses. During 7 days, from 3 to 10 May, the SFW blocked 3,858,562 requests.

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.).