OVH Networks King Of SPAM Bots

When it comes to Spam and I’m not talking about the kind that comes in a can. In my personal opinion OVH Networks is the king of spam.
I see their IPs in my logs each day. Tweet a blog post and here they come rushing over to attack your posts. OVH spam used to mostly come from France. But over the past few months a flood of their bots have been seen coming from Canada. They are using IP’s that resolve to “ns502708.ip-198-245-51.net” and so on.

Since I’m running this blog under CloudFlare it’s easy to block troublesome countries as a whole. Ukraine and China get shown the door right a way. But i don’t really want to block anybody, especially France and Canada.

CloudFlare does a good job blocking countries but actually challenges visitors with a captcha page. And there are certain IP ranges they have whitelisted.  But the idea is that bots can not solve a captcha challenge and end up denied access anyway.

WordPress Akismet does an excellent job of weeding through this maze of masked invaders pretty well. But Akismet is no longer free. If you have an old verified key better hang onto it and guard it with your life. 😆

Another solution i found that is only $8.00 per year is CleanTalk.org. I really like, and use their service on this blog. Whats great is it protects any contact forms you have. Protects registration forms, etc, with No Captcha Required. Here is a screen shot of my dashboard showing this blogs stats for a week.

CleanTalk.org also has spam solutions for phpBB and many other platforms. Check em out.

But getting back to my subject OVH Networks Spam. When i searched Google for that term i got an eyeful. From what i can see this operation is the host that welcomes spammers with open arms. Even their own forums has folks complaining. This topic is from 2013 and has entries from 2014. Looks like this company don’t give a hoot.

Just my two cents worth as usual. Any questions comment below. 😉