I noticed a lot of my WordPress spam is coming from a handful of IP address ranges. I’ve checked, and in the five-ish years I’ve been using WordPress, no valid comments seem to be coming from there. (Just tap the relevant IP address into the WP comment admin search box.)

Time for a little .htaccess magic, I think.

order allow,deny
deny from 194.8.75.
deny from 194.8.74.
deny from 87.118.112.
deny from 194.8.75.
deny from 194.8.74.
deny from 87.118.112.
deny from 61.18.170.
deny from 196.12.36.
deny from 219.64.175.
deny from 69.59.137.
deny from 80.88.242.
allow from all

By the way, in cPanel File Manager, to see .htaccess you have to switch on the option to view hidden files on the options page when you go in.

Anyway, the result is less spam, though there appears to be a rash of new attacks from a wide variety of IP addresses, with a shirtload of embedded links to upcoming.yahoo.com