Spam invasion

[pmbug]

Shortly after midnight last night (or is that this morning?), Bugland caught the attention of some rabid spammer(s) that figured out how to bypass the forum's security measures. Over the span of 3-4 hours, they managed to register 68 accounts using 15 IP addresses and post 335 threads across 9 different forum nodes (rooms) advertising phone numbers that were purportedly customer support lines for various companies. Who knows what the numbers really were - I wasn't about to call one of them.

This place was a mess and it took me (and @searcher who appears to have woken up and found the mess shortly before I did) about an hour to clean it up. I have shut down new member registrations for the moment while I work on tweaking the security measures.

 

[pmbug]

New member registration is working again. For now, new registrations are sent to a moderating queue for approval before posting privileges become active. The spam registrations have slowed down a lot in the last few hours. I think the spammer(s) are getting the point.

 

[Vichris]

Ya I saw all of that last night. I figured the place had been overrun by some kind of hackers. Glad you got it all cleaned up.

 

[Voodoo]

Ahh isn't AI grand.

 

[searcher]

Ahh isn't AI grand.

I'm thinking it was definitely automated. Maybe came in with the last member after chieftan. Don't remember the name.

moderating queue for approval

Got one in there now.

ut7tfds​

 

[pmbug]

...
Got one in there now.
...

They are still trying a few every hour or so. I'm checking them as they come.

 

[Goldhedge]

Thanks for burning the midnight oil guys...

Do you know how they hacked security?

 

[pmbug]

...
Do you know how they hacked security?

They didn't "hack" security. They adjusted their automated system so that it didn't trip the honey pots in our security. Most scripts/automated efforts trip the script - over 8,100 spam registrations have been stopped by this system in a little over a year. It's invisible to human visitors.