MovableType and IP Banning

I received an email today from my MovableType blog saying that a visitor to my old blog site tried posting a numerous amount of comments.  His/Her/Its IP address was automatically banned, which I thought was pretty cool functionality.  You can see a screen of the email below.

It’s pretty sad when developers have to spend all the extra time and energy to write the necessary code to prevent these sort of malicious things from happening.  I wonder who’s actually profiting/benefiting from comment spam and if they’re making any sort of decent revenue I will be extremely suprised.