Security problems
 

Hello,
Over the weekend I installed vbadvance and I dont know if that is the cause, but ever since then I've been seeing similair 'guests' in the whose online list appear like this :

Guest Unknown Location /home/register.php 219.159.67.187

rather than showing which link they've clicked on. I see some other similair Guests that appear to be in my root files. Overnight I've received 20 new members, all of which appear to be from spam and porn sites, mostly different IP addys, and now I am getting concerned that there is a security problem.

I am going to uninstall VBA but is there anything else I can do to stop this? My boards are private to guests so you have to register before you are allowed to post, email or anything else and the admin has to approve the registration. I've just been deleting the memberships as they come in.

Any help is really appreciated!

use a few human verification answers rather than captcha if you are using that.

right now i'm doing image verification

If you have questions/problems with a modification or style, then please post in the thread (or support forum/board) about that modification/style. Best chance to receive a reply from either the author or another member using the same modification/style.

Thanks Marco, sorry about that.
I posted about it there but didn't get hardly any response :( Thought maybe someone here might have run into the same problem

vBadvanced didn't have anything to do with the influx of spam, it was just a timing coincidence. A bunch of vB owners have been reporting a rash of spammer assaults due to the use of some sort of new software their using to get around the ReCAPTCHA images. But people have been having better luck with the verification questions. Also take a look at the NoSpam! modification.

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.

I think you found this as an article on vB.com (wrote it a few years ago IIRC).

I changed to recapcha from image verification - Haven't had one spammer join since

I prefer NoSpam! for the simple fact that you can add multiple questions at one time. Every so often I add something new in bulk.