egghelp/eggheads community

Yet another spambot...

2009-01-03T08:30:12-04:00

Yup, 'tis the new school :/
I guess slennox is buzy with IRL during the holidays, so we'll just have to hunt down the posts meanwhile.
Atleast it's not an avalanche-spammer, but I could imagine better things to do with all the snow outside.

A thought though; I've seen many forums requiring new members to introduce themselves in a public area before being allowed to post in the rest of the forum. Still means they can spam, but it keeps the crap to a limited area of the forum...

Statistics: Posted by nml375 — Sat Jan 03, 2009 8:30 am

Yet another spambot...

2009-01-01T19:38:22-04:00

sellwowgold2 have been bumping old threads with advertisements to several sites (I guess that's new style? )...

Statistics: Posted by Sir_Fz — Thu Jan 01, 2009 7:38 pm

Yet another spambot...

2008-11-30T22:54:31-04:00

please don't take my nick off, i am just sick, not dead

Statistics: Posted by Dedan — Sun Nov 30, 2008 10:54 pm

Yet another spambot...

2008-11-25T16:42:14-04:00

Been a long time since I pruned the user list. Always been the case that many users register but never activate or post. Haven't been keen on running the user pruning tool recently as it's old and unsupported - I'd rather have inactive users than risk messing up the database.

There are 4 users that have jingke as their website, but none have activated, so perhaps they're just spamming for the profile link.

Statistics: Posted by slennox — Tue Nov 25, 2008 4:42 pm

Yet another spambot...

2008-11-24T11:17:20-04:00

Old thread, I know...

Just got a bit bored and scanned through the userlist..
Seems we've got some 800+ users registered with 0 posts. Of course not all of those are spammers, but a quick look at the profile would suggest some 50% of these may very well be the result of some (semi)automated process (aka spambots). Considering the low number of posts that do slip through the net, I'd say the spam protection works fairly well.

As for new accounts, I've noticed atleast 2 accounts related to a Chinese spamhub/web registrar known as jingke, created within the last two weeks. I would say the captcha does limit the number of automated accounts, but they're still coming through.

Statistics: Posted by nml375 — Mon Nov 24, 2008 11:17 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-17T09:44:07-04:00

It's rather a "simple" process of signal processing.. Or, atleast the theory of it is...

Step one is to remove the "noice" from the signal (backgrounds, shades, etc), so that we get a decent representation of the actual letters.

Step two would be some shaping and anti-aliasing, just to smooth things out.

Step three is to isolate each letter "object" from the image, and arrange these.

And the final step would be to match these objects to shapes of real letters using heuristic algorithms...

Of course, coding these steps might not be as trivial :p

Back on track however, just checking the last two pages of the members list reveals maybe 30-50 possible spambot candidates. However, these seem yet unable to actually create posts (suspicion based on Handle, website, IM, email, etc. available in their profile-page).
Also, these Captchas only prevent automated registration; which can easily be circumvented like Domin suggested by having manual labor entering this info upon request. They don't offer any protection once the registration is done however. An evil spammer would simply register a bunch of accounts, then use them one at a time until banned, causing a virtually seamless flood of spam.

And yes, as an old serveradmin, webmaster, etc. I am paranoid!

Statistics: Posted by nml375 — Sun Aug 17, 2008 9:44 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-17T04:15:17-04:00

Have there been any more spambots in the past week? The current captcha isn't the default phpbb one and is quite strong - I've had a look and can barely read most of them - it's a miracle we get any signups at all

Haha ye i actualy dont understand how they get bots to read them, since i also find them hard to read

One approach i heard about i to put a link from here on a xxx page and then make real people enter numbers there for seeing pictures, so if you got some sort of stats page you might be able to see if there are some suspect pages linking to the captcha images.

Statistics: Posted by Domin — Sun Aug 17, 2008 4:15 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-17T01:26:11-04:00

Have there been any more spambots in the past week? The current captcha isn't the default phpbb one and is quite strong - I've had a look and can barely read most of them - it's a miracle we get any signups at all

Statistics: Posted by slennox — Sun Aug 17, 2008 1:26 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-16T11:19:09-04:00

One possible approach, I guess, would be to use something like the "Approval MOD", and restrict postings for those who hasn't had 10 approved posts yet.

The downside would mainly be a lot more work for us moderators, and the possible discomfort of censorship of new members.

Statistics: Posted by nml375 — Sat Aug 16, 2008 11:19 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-16T07:02:00-04:00

Well Captcha is much more devloped in v3, there is a list of changes here:

http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/

Perhaps this mod can fix it if you dont wish to upgrade:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... a&start=15

Statistics: Posted by Domin — Sat Aug 16, 2008 7:02 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-09T20:09:03-04:00

Looks like the whac-a-mole game will continue until additional preventative measures are taken. I'm up to page 4 of 37 in the list of available mods

Statistics: Posted by slennox — Sat Aug 09, 2008 8:09 pm

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-08T08:09:59-04:00

More spam:

ijkl884
davidmncc

It looks like nml375 is busy dealing with davidmncc - I've deleted all posts by ijkl884 (if you edit their posts, make sure you remove/rewrite all urls so they don't get the google juice they're here for)

Statistics: Posted by user — Fri Aug 08, 2008 8:09 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-02T06:07:28-04:00

Hey there slennox long time no see

Statistics: Posted by Moonster — Sat Aug 02, 2008 6:07 am

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-01T19:35:24-04:00

Hehe, or perhaps and update to phpbb couldt fix the problem

Looked at the docs for 3.0 and didn't see any indication of changes to the flood protection, though I may have missed something since it wouldn't let me display the entire guide on one page to search.

Statistics: Posted by slennox — Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:35 pm

Yet another spambot...

2008-08-01T08:41:00-04:00

Hehe, or perhaps and update to phpbb couldt fix the problem

Statistics: Posted by Domin — Fri Aug 01, 2008 8:41 am