Read This-PM Problem & Spambot Update

[ricki]

This post went up yesterday, Thusday

What's going on out there in hackerland? I've banned a bunch of spambots, 8 today, Thursday, that seem to have been resurrected from several years ago from the join date. Did they just let someone out of jail or something? Good thing intuition helps to spot most of them. I expect some may get through to posting something so apologies in advance until I can take 'em down. If they did just let some hacker out of the pokey, why not stick him back inside for a while?

[ricki]

This post went up tonight, Friday

Several of us have received PM links to a porn side. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Please bear with me on this and we'll get it sorted out.


PLEASE DELETE PM's that you don't recognize or think are not credible particularly those with the following in the subject line:

"Have you seen this website"

Thank you,

[ricki]

I just shut private messaging off until we can get this sorted out.

Thanks for your patience.

[ricki]

Still working on this. Sorry for the inconvenience, hackers are still working hard out there. Hope to have PM's restored soon.

I would consider blocking all countries that aren't the U.S. and Canada (with a couple of exceptions if known members are from a certain country).
I don't think we have anyone on here from China or Thailand, but.. that's where a lot of spam comes from, so......

Also, consider limiting PM rights to actual members by restricting that ability to members with 3 to 5 posts as a minimum before that permission kicks in.

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=168305

[admin]

Originally Posted by Skyway Scott

I would consider blocking all countries that aren't the U.S. and Canada.

Seems like a lot of this is from China.

Thanks for your input Scott. Just had some upgrades and additions added to the site. One is minimum number of posts before being able to PM. I usually catch the spammers after the first post or so. We have a lot of members from various countries other than the USA and Canada so limiting to those areas would a problem. Hope this fix works.

Hope it helps. Limiting PM privileges to a certain number of posts is the least techie and probably most effective step in this case.

Thats one way, or monitoring the number PMs to different people at the same time.

For example, PM's sent to 5 people in one day containing a url, account locked for review due to suspicious activity.

You could do this with a simple cron job and a script with a few queries on the database. Query the PM timestamps count(*) group by date,userid. 5 in one day, update users table and lock the account.

Or, you could just do the obvious. Only let people register with a real name.
Only activate their account after you have validated their identity, and sh.t can all the obviously fake acc'ts about lovingcialis, playingpoker, and buyingviagra. LOL.

Spambots can theoretically be a nightmare, but without admin activation, they are pretty powerless.

[conchxpress]

How do the spammers use other people's already existing forum names? I talked to a few people that got the same porn video, but each PM was sent with a different name.