I doubt this mod was the vulnerability. Once someone gains access to your file system they can exploit any file they want.

My bad - you were correct. Somehow, they got access to my AdminCP (which I renamed from default long ago) and were injecting PHP redirect code into the plugins. I have ensured there are no rogue admin accounts and all passwords have been reset and further secured my AdminCP with .htaccess and voila, the redirects have stopped. :up:

Thankfully, the VPS my board sits on was not compromised in any way.

If you have the filestore hack you will have to do more than that. You will need to check and clean your files and your database.

A good place to start is in the diagnostics within your admincp and look for debase64 added to any of those files.. Mark has a guide on this if you search.

Better to start a new thread though or post in an existing thread about this hack if you need too so we do not go off topic here.

GlowHost is secure. I have been using it for many years on many sites and never had a security issue with it. :up:

Thanks, I found that old thread and did all of that as a follow-up to boot. :up:

I realize this hasn't been updated in a while and this is probably not worth bringing up but...

For the last few weeks I've had some very persistent spammers causing me headaches. Firstly they're starting off using new email addresses (all gmail) and clean IP addresses from SFS's perspective. They register, then put spam info into their profile fields, such as name. I do the easy cleanup immediately and their data is submitted to SFS as expected. The issue is that since this appears to be automated, they simply register again immediately using the same IP and email, and I have to manually cleanup registrations from the same email/ip multiple times.

I believe this is because of the caching function of GSOM. If only the bad query results (i.e. this name/email/ip is listed in the db), rather than all query results, then this wouldn't be a problem. And, doing it this way wouldn't add unnecessary burden to SFS's servers because valid users aren't constantly trying to register. Caching clean results isn't necessary.

I'm going to comb through the code myself to see if I can cobble something together but I'm not a dev so I don't have high hopes for success.

You should install the New Racaptcha plug in.. https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/misc.php?..._new_recaptcha

That was the first thing I did but it didn't help, not even a little bit.

I have been running a couple of modifications which can help make a few dollars with the Glowhost Spam-O-Matic plug in.

Here it is Click Here.

Is an extented data privacy statement necessary when this mod is installed?
Like for sending user IPs and email adresses to Akismet and StopForumSpam?

Hmm funny you say this. I'm dealing with the same issue right now. Slowly enabling addons one at a time and looking for updates. I haven't enabled this yet and no redirects so far.