Trackbacks used for Spaming

It’s becoming clear that trackbacks are becoming more of an option for spammers in their quest to p**s the world off.  I have noticed an increasing amount of trackback spam links on this site and I have to say it is really starting to bother me.

so how does it work?

The spammers out there have realised that simply trying to post spam links on a site is becoming harder and harder with spam filters increasing blocking their attempts.  However they have come up with a new method (well I say new but its been around for a couple of years now), by simply "linking" to a page on a site which has trackbacks enabled they will have get a trackback link placed on their victims site.  So simple yet annoying.

what can be done about it?

Well there are several solutions to this problem including renaming or deleting the wp-trackback.php as well as several plugins. 

I have decided to use a plugin by the Computer Security Lab at Rice University.  They provide a simple yet effective solution which checks to make sure a link has been placed on the site that provided the trackback, something most spammers wont do.

Hope this helps!