At a previous place of employment we had massive problems with abuse. Early on it was fairly rare since our platform wasn't as well known as something like drupal or wordpress. We started with inconsistent flare ups of abusive activity. Most of it wasn't even automated. Just a one or two users solving captchas and creating accounts then posting links to pharmaceuticals. Often the abusive activity was ignored since it wasn't visible and we didn't have any automated tools to handle bulk deletion of accounts or content. But after a while it became very visible. We started getting hit by a single ip creating thousands of pieces of content an hour. Cleanup took almost as long as it took to create the content and in some cases longer. After blocking the abusive IP we started getting hit from multiple IPs and soon we were getting hit by a botnet. The response was to put captchas on almost all of the content creation tools and put permanent blocks on the abusive IP addresses.

This week's project will center around countering abuse like this. I'll be developing an open source stand alone service that a company can plug into their architecture. I'll post the github link as soon as I've finished the first prototype.

Project Summary: Service which interacts with web services to help protect against abusive traffic.

Features:
Simple Restful Interface
Standalone Service
User Configurable Thresholds and Throttling
Alerts