Major spam today

[Doughboy]

Has anyone else noticed a big increase in spam bot postings and registrations today?

Today on two of my vb installations I've had 100+ posts from multiple spam accounts. Up until today I've never really got too much spam, because my boards aren't too big.

My boards @ jayscountry.ca pretty much never had a spam bot register or post, but today I've been flooded. 4 spam bots are online right now:
Currently Active Users: 8 (5 members and 3 guests)
View Who's Online
Most users ever online was 63, 12-05-2007 at 01:23 PM.
Erik, Juscuptuppobe, plupierly, TetrySozy, vaniaandkicig


*** Image removed, not suitable on vB.org ***

Two spam accounts had 24 posts... easy enough to remove the posts and ban... but then there were 15+ spam accounts with 1 post.

Any suggestions for anti-spammage and mass account removal?

[keith455]

reCaptcha or Q&A... i'm trying Q&A for awhile.. seems like the normal image verification is to easy for bots to pass.. or

[Dismounted]

Some spam bots now use humans to decipher the CAPTCHA/Q&A, before automatically spamming a forum.

[StonePilot]

I got hit VERY hard yesterday. I turned on the email verification (had it turned off due to some email issues from my IP) and that alone seemed to cut down about 90% of it. The bots would still register, but not be allowed to post as they were'nt verified.

I don't see a Q&A functionality in the Human Verifcation system. Is that part of vb 3.7?

[Dismounted]

I don't see a Q&A functionality in the Human Verifcation system. Is that part of vb 3.7?
Yes

[john102774]

Yep, I'm getting spam on my site also, I wonder why? I'm looking for an anti spam hack. Also thinking about turning on email verification as well. Any other ideas on what I should do? :)

[Dismounted]

Definitely turn on email verification.

[Lynne]

There are several posts over on vb.com about this. I may have to go back to my two Registered Usergroup system (the first one is moderated and then users get promoted to the other one which is not).

[Snkypete]

I've seen a significant increase in the past 3 days. I've easily deleted 50 new accounts.

We have a simple way to prevent them from posting which doesn't require moderation - I'd be happy to share it privately (just in case they're watching this forum). So we don't get offensive posts, just a little admin work to delete their accounts.

[unitedbreaks]

I have too. Running 3.6.10

We've had almost 100 new registrations. I stopped the new registrations using NoSpam! Verification Mod.

I am looking for a mass delete/ban account based on criteria. Anyone know of one?

[StonePilot]

I have probably gotten 200 spam accounts sign up in the past two days.

I don't see anything called "Q&A" or any such option listed in the Human Verification section of the vb options in the ACP. Is there another name?

[Lynne]

I have probably gotten 200 spam accounts sign up in the past two days.

I don't see anything called "Q&A" or any such option listed in the Human Verification section of the vb options in the ACP. Is there another name?
It's under the main vBulletin Options heading (vboptiomns > Human Verification Manager), not the second one (vboptions > vbopitons > Human Verification Options),

[iogames]

There are several posts over on vb.com about this. I may have to go back to my two Registered Usergroup system (the first one is moderated and then users get promoted to the other one which is not).

Yeah, there's a 'wave' :confused: any thoughts?

[Lynne]

Yeah, there's a 'wave' :confused: any thoughts?
So far we haven't been hit, but I have posted in my Staff forum telling my Mods about this and asking them to post in that thread I made if they see it happening. I hate having first posts moderated, it causes problems in a couple of my forums. I am also thinking of adding some users to our One-touch Spam Ban hack. We have some trusted users who are always around (it seems) and they could probably see the spam right away and get rid of it. I'm tempted to turn back on the email notification in my Is Bot hack, but not so tempted to actually do it since I don't feel like getting my siteadmin account flooded!

[ZomgStuff]

I got hit rather hard with bot registrations yesterday, but luckily they weren't able to post any threads, however. I had about ~60 registrations yesterday, a good 90% chunk of that being bots.

[-=Leb=-]

I'm having same problems guys . All the ips i checked came from russia, latvia, netherland, panama, japan, and couple from germany.

I have strong feeling they are just stupid kids who are spamming our forums .
The Human Verification Options are turned on but they are still registering and confiming their email addresses.

Anyway, i turned off the registration option and made the forum private for guests. Now the only registered members can access the website which mean it sucks for the new customers.

I hope the VB managers and administrators can give us some advices on this.

Thank you for reading my post

[iogames]

Well it's nice to witness this digital era's phenomenon, but I mean, how do they decided to attack at once and so many of us? what's the purpose, because I don't think ppl fell for it anymore... and to such knowledge I don't see economic retribution...

[ATVTorture]

We're getting a couple a day as well starting a few days ago. A couple came from the same ip leading back to something.broadband.ru so I just blocked their ip range. Now this morning I've gotten one from Burma and one from somewhere else. I hate to keep banning ip ranges as there COULD BE a legit person wanting to join that has the same provider but what else can we do?

Thanks!
Buster

[aaphox]

Ive been getting about 50 bots a day... spamming porn, viagra, medicine, god knows what else =[

[ATVTorture]

Well ours are currently registering but not doing the email verification. Hopefully if nothing else it continues that way. It just makes for having to do unnecessary cleanup.

It sux.

[user_not_found]

Me I deleted around 15 accounts in 2 day I never had too many spam before very curious.
Also captcha and email verification is enabled only for email verification I had 10 users... who tried and never confirmed their email

[v12kid]

just deleted 50 accounts from this morning, had to turn on recaptcha and turned on moderate new members in hopes to slowing them down. I did some random ip checks and they all turn to the former soviet republic.

[puertoblack2003]

I'm curious is this a random thing that occurs? or the site contents that attracts them.?

[fatal1980]

The captcha for most forum software has been cracked and no human intervention is required.

http://www.seopedia.org/spam/blackhat-video-xrumer-the-forum-spamming-software/

[noppid]

Anyone can install Stop the Registration Bots (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=183917) and make this problem go away.

Speaking of going away, I'll be gone all weekend and never worry about spam once. Have a great day!

[AtoZ]

I've had to delete/ban at least 100 accounts since Oct. 1. I discovered the ones I deleted came back with the same username and/or email address so I've had to switch to banning them. Most of them are using gmail and they are confirming their accounts (as it's required). I've never had a problem like this in the 7+ years of forum administration.

What I've found extremely helpful is the Check4Spam mod. It is set up to block links in a more sophisticated way than any other mods I've used. There is also a keyword filter that will send posts to moderation if they are triggered. It works beautifully. Only a couple of posts have gotten through and they didn't have any links or obscene/pharmacy keywords in them.

One thing I don't have is the Q&A... I think I'm going to try adding that to see if it cuts down on registrations getting through. It's time consuming enough to have to go through and ban the accounts. They are posting their links in one of the user profile fields so I feel like I need to get rid of them even if they aren't able to post anything.

--------------- Added 1223065030 at 1223065030 ---------------

Anyone can install Stop the Registration Bots (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=183917) and make this problem go away.

Speaking of going away, I'll be gone all weekend and never worry about spam once. Have a great day!
Thanks for the tip! I'm hoping there is something similar for 3.6 because I haven't upgraded yet. ;)

[okhissabigfish]

killing me here too...one every 7 minutes... any help anywhere?

[noppid]

Thanks for the tip! I'm hoping there is something similar for 3.6 because I haven't upgraded yet. ;)

I use it on 3.6.11 PL1. It should work fine.

I updated the mod description to reflect this.

[AtoZ]

killing me here too...one every 7 minutes... any help anywhere?

Did you read the whole thread? The 2 posts right before yours recommend two good mods to help alleviate this problem. (Check4Spam and Stop the Spam Bots)

--------------- Added 1223069346 at 1223069346 ---------------

I use it on 3.6.11 PL1. It should work fine.

I updated the mod description to reflect this.

Thanks for that! I am installing it now. I am always thankful that others have come up with these solutions before I have to worry about them. :up:

I had installed isBot in the mean time and while it has blocked some, others have gotten through. It looks like it will be easy to circumvent.

[alpine spirit]

Here is what I did on my board... from Vb.org I think it was

How to add an extra registration question to frustrate human-assisted bot registration?

AdminCP -> User Profile Fields -> Add New User Profile Field

Profile Field Type: Single-Line Text Field

Use the following information when creating the Profile Field:
Title: Can you spell?
(Note: Adjust the title to the question you want to ask)
Description: Enter the first character of the word "Monkey"
(Note: Adjust the question. Don't use this example as it would be quickly picked up by bot registrations)
Default Value: B
(Note: anything but a valid answer)
Field Required: Yes at registration
Field Editable by User: Only at registration
Private Field: Yes
Field Searchable on Members List: No
Show on Members List: No
Regular Expression: ^[mM]$
(Note: this expression would only allow a 'm' or 'M' as valid answers, adjust to your needs)

This is not a fool proof solution, but will probably limit the number of semi-automated registrations.

FYI.. It killed the bots (50 a day), its been almost 36 hours and no spammer registrations, 3 legit registrations.

[Rene Kriest]

Agree. I was also hit by a couple of spam bots yesterday which seemed like a spam bot invasion to me.

I didn't install any additional anti-spam bot addons etc. just to see how those spam bot work. Yesterday was the 1st time my vb forum got attacked by those spam morons.

[nbaphenom]

Yea i get hit today by 3 of them and my forum just started they only posted a question like send me your secrets or something weird .

[-=Leb=-]

Hey guys i stoped the spammer after when i installed this great hack :)

add it to your forum and you wont regret :D

Just make sure you add atleast 2 questions to block the stupid spammers from registering on your forum.
Note: make your questions easy lol

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=183329

[Bradley_Wint]

Ya same problem here...having 20+ bots a day..quite annoying having to delete them all.. Just implemented the human timer limiter mod, hoping that works.

[kopoba11]

Guys, I did some research.

I found that spammers use this tool

*** Link removed, please do not link to spam software. ***

It's free to try, at least we can learn the tool so we can defeat it.

Later

[jkcerda]

weirs locations they are trying

Unknown Location
/login.php?do=logout&logouthash=2b90c8ef1d865163c38499d91db474e58b19166 6

/register.php?do=addmember&do=addmember

[Brandon Sheley]

I still haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary lately with spam bots on my sites

[Lynne]

I still haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary lately with spam bots on my sites
Me either... knock on wood! It makes me wonder how they are picking the sites.

[jonbaker]

well i am glad it is not only my site. between 11pm last night and 7 am this morning i deleted 12 new accounts.

i have questions that you need to answer. but not specific like what is the 3rd key on teh top row type. but like Real Name, make of car and such, the default answer is "TEST" so i search for new accounts with TEST as the real name..

i just turned off new registrations for now. maybe that'll do something.

[noppid]

I still haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary lately with spam bots on my sites

You have to have a good search engine listing to have the honor of being attacked. :p

How ya doin' man? :)

[mathias]

yea I had a big problem maybe about 15 new accounts every 3 or 4 hours.... been crazy

[JesterP]

I just enabled Re-Captcha, and all is back to normal.

J

[mpasternak]

i got hit in the last couple days with about 100 members.

my forum is now set to moderate new users (which i hate!) but every time a user registers i've checked with www.stopforumspam.com to see if they have al isting there

what i've thought though. Why isn't there a global database of known spam IP's and email accounts that could be shared over all of vbulletin users?

some sort of add on that on registration will check against a central database and automatically stop users, or have those IP's banned.

and if you banned someone for it, their iP / email would automatically be submitted to this database

[Browser11]

I had the same problem to.

I just added another question during registration in order to get rid of these, and seems like working.
Good think is that is a Greek forum and the question is in Greek language so is not so easy for spammers.

I did not use any hacks or plugins, I just added another field in users according to this....

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205214

[ATVTorture]

I will say we implemented the mod recommended in Noppid's post #23 below and they stopped immediately. We left the default setting of rejecting any submission that took less than 15 seconds and have had none it picked up accidently.

We currently have it set, as default, to send us a notification on every one it rejects. It tells you the user name and email address they were trying to use, as well as how long it took to complete. Most submissions were completed in 2-3 seconds which is humanly impossible.

Buster

[noppid]

My inbox is flooded with Bot attempts that were blocked. The email addresses are getting familiar.

I have been changing my hidden field info, only one or two letters per hidden field, just in case they get a leg up and modify the attack.

So far, so good. Knock wood. :)

[Bill from Cleve]

I'm running 3.7.3 and I have been flooded with human spammers from a Russian Spam server called svservers.com. When I was using SMF, they had a great tool that would allow me to Host ban and IP ban octect ranges "172.34.1.1 - 172.34.255.254". This worked great 100% of the time.
Does VB have this feature, or can someone point me in the right direction to finding an addon?

[snakes1100]

You can use a htaccess file and use host deny, add the below to the top of the htaccess file and resave.

order allow,deny
deny from 1.1.1 24.24.23.21 (put a space between each ip)

or

order allow,deny
deny from 10.10.10.10
deny from 24.24.23.21

[Marco van Herwaarden]

You can ban a partial IP address in the vB Options.

[Bill from Cleve]

Great, thanks!

[snakes1100]

If you want to stop all requests to your server from that range of ip's, use the htaccess file versus the admincp, that is only stopping them from accessing the forums, not the server itself.

[Doughboy]

Check out one of my other vb boards (http://sportsportal.ca/forums/index.php). The boards were pretty much "trafficless" (maybe 25 posts from actual posters) until the spam wave hit.

How the heck to I quickly trash 17,000 posts?

Threads: 17,462, Posts: 17,498, Members: 45, Active Members: 39
User Name Email Join Date Last Activity Post Count Options
asteikuw carlobeach85@yahoo.co.uk 10-10-2008 10-25-2008 6,234
akunamat billieferguson36@yahoo.co.uk 10-10-2008 10-25-2008 5,674
berkutar randallwise86@yahoo.co.uk 10-11-2008 10-26-2008 5,557