The Problem And The Solution
If you had the experience of managing a website, you must be too familiar with the abundance of spammers that flood the comment section advertising various products or posting links to malicious websites. Most of these spammers are actually computer bots that act according to specific algorithms that allow them to register as users on your website and perform their damaging activity.
Every such spammer can be typically easily identified online by their IP address. Obviously, your website is not the only one that is targeted by these spammers – to make things more efficient, the same IP addresses are used for multiple targets. This peculiarity makes it possible for the Internet community to collaborate in recognizing such spammers, which are often associated with many other dangerous activities on the net, including hacking, brute force attacks, fraud, phishing, etc.
There are companies that specialize in collecting information about such IPs or emails that are associated with spam accounts (these are also normally reused) and using these to block or filter activity from such IP addresses. These companies also make it possible to use API for automated spam checking allowing to run an IP check instantly and base decisions on it (e.g. blocking registration, a comment post, etc.).
Integrated Solutions By Leading Companies
Top players in the field offer their clients cloud-based solutions covering various security-related and other kinds of aspects with regard to their websites:
- An automated or manual IP check. By running a search for a suspicious IP, the client can get information about associated emails, number of reports for spam activity, IP country of origin, date of discovery (of the malicious activity), ISP information, type of attacks carried (if any), status (can be blacklisted or just suspicious), usernames and nicknames along with emails used for registration, etc;
- Brute-force protection (a brute force attack systematically tries multiple usernames and passwords to guess the credentials of the website administrator). One way protection can be implemented is by enforcing delays of a few seconds for each failed login attempt, while after a given number of attempts, a much longer delay is enforced (e.g. 24 hours). Doing so not only enhances security but prevents servers from wasting resources on such IPs;
- Logging user actions and providing integrated and detailed security logs every specified interval of time;
- Monitoring user activity (e.g. time spent on the website, number of pages visited, likely type of visitor (computer or human)). If anomalies are detected, the IP can be blocked instantly;
- Malware scanner to delete infected code from files;
- Content monitoring (e.g. monitoring in order to identify hate speech, racist comments, insults, etc.). This can be viewed as a bonus offered by the company with its products.
As can be noted, the variety of angles from which security is approached allows for truly comprehensive protection of your website.