Major spam today
 

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:

*** 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?

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

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

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?

Yes

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? :)

Definitely turn on email verification.

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).

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.

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?

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),

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!

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.

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

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...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

http://www.seopedia.org/spam/blackha...ming-software/

Anyone can install Stop the Registration Bots 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!

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 [DATE]1223065030[/DATE] at [TIME]1223065030[/TIME] ---------------

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

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

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

I updated the mod description to reflect this.

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 [DATE]1223069346[/DATE] at [TIME]1223069346[/TIME] ---------------

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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

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.

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

weirs locations they are trying

Unknown Location
/login.php?do=logout&logouthash=2b90c8ef1d865163c38 499d91db474e58b191666

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

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.

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.

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

How ya doin' man? :)