Staffing anyone else getting hit by Spambots posts in Guest areas?

[Dusty 55]

In the last 48 hours, our site has been hit by spam posts originating from Rusian Federation based IP addresses.

Anyone else getting hit?

 

We have reported all hits to JCink admin and it's being dealt with as an ongoing issue atm.

[VirusZero 176]

I occasionally get hit by Russian spambots... but not a huge amount (I blocked most of Russia via .htaccess). Though lately I've noticed a lot more bots making it through registration. (It used to be 1-2 every few weeks, but as of late it seems like I've been getting one every other day.) It's always pretty obvious these are bots too, they have names that seem almost randomly thrown together and end with 4 numbers (EX- bvelesyptrovy1154). Plus they don't actually manage to validate their account (because their email addresses are fake, I usually can see the emails bouncing back to my admin address) so they appear as account not activated.

 

I'm almost afraid to look at my logs and see how many aren't making it through...

[Dusty 55]

They've been hitting the guest posting areas which we have tightened up to only be the advertising first link, link back and affiliates.

Edited January 5, 2017 by Dusty

[Honorem 219]

I used to get hit something chronic back on Icyboards, Jcink never. I suppose it depends where you advertise and whether they get a hold of your link, because once they do they'll crawl all over the place like little spiders. Pesky buggers.

[Morrigan 1,826]

I'm a pretty evil administrator, at least here on The Initiative and for my hosting sites. I block most spam related countries altogether. I don't do it via IP, I do it by locale. So places like Russia and China aren't even able to hit this site. It's intentional, when I first started running my site I used to get a lot of just plain server attacks from those countries trying to gain access to my admin panels.

 

I don't normally blanket ban but in this specific case it was not a group or even a cluster of IPs. It was whole class A subnets (which is a lot of fucking computers for those that don't speak network geek) were trying to get access to it. Basically it felt like half the country of Russia and China wanted to hack me.

 

Spam in general is a pain in the ass so I wish you luck with this.

[Elena 546]

Russian roleplayers exist though, and it would be a pity to block them too...

[Morrigan 1,826]

 I agree @Elena that Russian and likely even Chinese roleplayers exist. It's a pity to have to do such a thing. I don't do it maliciously but for server integrity and safety. Before I blocked those two countries my logs all over the server were littered with failed hack attempts, not just on accounts that exist on the forums but to the admin side where all of the data exists. If it were 1-2 attempts every once in a while it wouldn't have perturbed me but it was a few dozen per day.

[VirusZero 176]

Sites on Jcink are under constant attack also, but Jcink's measures are usually enough to keep them at bay. (Jcink changes their system up about every other month to keep bots out).

 

Though regarding blocking Chinese and Russian roleplayers...

China's internet is so censored the chance of an actual Chinese roleplayer joining is already slim. (If anything they'd probably need to use a VPN to bypass restrictions anyway so chances are they wouldn't even look like they were from China.) Then of course there is the potential language barrier and the fact that Russian and Chinese players have games in their own native languages. (Though nowadays it seems like many Chinese do speak English. Russians... perhaps not so much.) 

 

Realistically the chances of either a Russian or Chinese player joining is so slim that it's not worth trying to deal with the spam produced by those countries. If there were tons of Russian or Chinese players looking to join then it might be a different story. So for most admins it's far safer to just block and be done.

 

Though if a legitimate user from China or Russia wanted to join then the admin (on self-hosted sites) could make an exception in the security measures to let them in. It might take a few minutes to do, but better that than spend much more time cleaning out spam.

[Bishop 172]

I wouldn't block, but I do get this a great deal. I haven't in a while, and I'm not sure even how much of this is connected but I had a character named Isis for a while (From the Egyptian Goddess) and it seemed every time I mentioned him there would be a swarm of them. So maybe check and see if you have a trigger word for government intel? Lol 

 

But that is just me wondering. 

 

For the most part they are pretty harmless I've found. Now when I staffed on the D a bit we would get a lot of porn ads or like...adverts for products and stuff. So sometimes a lot of that is just spam bots testing out to see if your board is something they can post on. 

 

Ramp up your admin security and keep in contact with John. He's really great at helping.

[CovertSphinx 710]

My sites don't currently get enough traffic to attract the spam lol. But I've always in the past consistently got a bot her or there that took a few seconds to clean out. Nothing ever major.

[Verridith 66]

We've been getting several spambots recently, and that's both blessing and curse - it means that we're getting enough traffic to warrant spambot attention, but also really annoying, lol! We might have to put passwords on our guest areas. xD

[mystical 8]

My site's 4 months old and in the past week or so I've had a couple spam hits in guest friendly areas. Never more than one post and it's easy to catch. But I'm with Verridith's idea in the above post, guess that means I've drawn enough attention to the site to warrant it, lol 

[Morrigan 1,826]

@Verridith I would be very careful with adding a password to the guest area. While I understand the reason why, it would be more difficult for an automated bot, but a lot of sites have a "fair is fair" policy so if they don't have a guest password they expect to not have to enter one on your site. What this will do is start to slim up your advertising by having posts deleted from other sites.

[Verridith 66]

2 minutes ago, Morrigan said:

@Verridith I would be very careful with adding a password to the guest area. While I understand the reason why, it would be more difficult for an automated bot, but a lot of sites have a "fair is fair" policy so if they don't have a guest password they expect to not have to enter one on your site. What this will do is start to slim up your advertising by having posts deleted from other sites.

 I was actually thinking about that, yeah - it's not bad now but we might have to at some point, should we get much more. Two or three a day I'm not concerned with, but ten or so a day I couldn't deal with @_@

[Morrigan 1,826]

I think at that point everyone would go with a password @Verridith lol!