Latest spam attack (2009-09-10 17:24UTC)

[IgorEliezer]

We suffered a huge spam attack some minutes ago. The spammer, that one tagged "(SPAMMER OWNED BY FORUM ADMIN)" and LOSER, had posted 15 topics in a row with "mature" material.

The spammer was caught still on-line, was permanently banned from forum, likely other spammers. Its IPs, e-mail, username and all from it was blocked. We administrators "defeated" the spammer in about 8 minutes after spam attack has concluded.

I suspect 3 or 4 members had the bad experience of opening such topics filled with trash. That's the worst part and that's why I'm posting this topic.

We are sorry for the mess.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

I'd just like to add: Part of the reason we get these attacks is that we haven't quite set the bar on membership quite as high as we can, because it's an inconvenience to those trying to register. So we get occasional spams - although this is the first attack like this I can recall in some time...

[Spike]

Lately a few spam bots came in my forum, which runs SMF 1.10 on the highest security setting. Just saying, that's not enough to keep them out.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Hmm... Good to know - no reason to bother upping security, then.

I think the only way to get around CAPTCHA abuse is to roll your own that can't be *automated* to humans (i.e. they set up sites where you solve teh captcha and you get a dirty pic - and the spammer gets through)...

There is one method I thought of to get around it:
1. Create a board specifically for new members
2. Give regular members no rights to post outside that board
3. Soon as a member says "yes, I'm human" - change their membership group to a group that has rights to see all the regular boards

i.e. manual approval after they post. Spammers get caught because no matter how many times they post, it's contained.

...but it's not a perfect solution, because it's a little more work - and someone has to move every single person...

[Spike]

In my last forum it worked to patch it so that it required the captcha be entered backwards. Bots can't read and will fail to follow the notice - although a few people also fell into the trap. But well, it worked

[Ashley]

Another good captcha method I've seen is to present the user with a randomised grid of pictures of animals, e.g. cats, and one of them is a dog. You then say "click on the dog to continue". People can very easily identify a dog or a cat, but bots can't

[vilvoh]

The problem of kind of captchas is that the amount of possible solutions is very small, so sometimes they're sensible to brute force attacks, over other types  such as mathematical captchas or word captchas.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

well, but I think the main point here is that SMF makes us a large target for automated attacks. Anything non-standard would mean the automated attacks that target SMF would no longer work.

However, it would also mean having custom code to deal with every single time we need to upgrade the forum....

[Spike]

Maybe once SMF 2.0 is out, and everyone has upgraded, the spammers won't target SMF 1.x so much anymore.

Edit: Seems a futile hope, why should bots loose the old abilites when new are added ...

[colonyan]

--sorry to reuse old post but theres a spam here
  15 oct 2009 11:56PM east coast time

  user name:Greaccapohype
  under name : you can more(viagra, with pictures), general discussion

   ______
   Edit: As of 12:14AM 16 OCT, have been removed

[IgorEliezer]

Edit: As of 12:14AM 16 OCT, have been removed

Ninja admin!!!