Spammers' IPs - Time to Fight Back

[softbaked]

One change to the login system of a forum can be enough to lock out spammers.

Hi Mike, yes as I posted above (see my quote below) a CAPTCHA is not the final solution for spam defense but a good CAPTCHA will stop 90% of it.

Another point is the forums here will need more than a good CAPTCHA to fight and win this battle, there are a couple other things they need to do (of which I will not go into here because the spammers will be reading this) that will eliminate 99.99% of the problems.

One of the admins recently has re-appeared and has pledged to fight the spam; I haven't seen much change as of yet though.

I hope they follow through, I estimate it will take less than 4 hours to clean everything up and put the proper things in place to keep it out. (1 hour a day for four days is all it would take)

It would work in theory, but rejecting a whole block of ISP customers based on one (potentially unwilling zombie) spammer could be something the admins object to.

I would never block an entire block an entire IP range from any country(s) that many of my users come from as my post above explains, the work around I mentioned does work.

What you do with those is report that IP address with a date and time to the ISP noting that the user is promoting drugs and pornography illegally (with links to the crime).

If you do or say nothing the answer is no.

There's nothing illegal about promoting porn or drugs, and I don't think we can really call spam a crime. At least on this scale.

Yes it is illegal to sell pharmaceutical drugs on the internet without a license, I'm sure every drug link from this sites points to somebody who is not licensed, (i.e. any legitimate seller of pharmaceutical is not going to spam your site). As for the porn, the law requires a warning to minors before they are shown any nudity, I do not see any warnings here or in any of the porn posts and in fact if a minor were exposed to porn from a link on this forum his/her parents could sue Nettools, if you don't believe that I'll post links of proof.


There is not one single silver bullet solution that will fix the spam problem on its own, it's the combination of road blocks you put up that make it too time consuming (i.e. not profitable) for the spammer(s) to continue, I know this from experience because I'm a security consultant, I get paid to fix problems like this and believe me this is a minor one here that would take very little time to correct. The only reason I posted is because I have used this site in the past to gather information about the spammers and hackers I battle every day and I just wanted to return the favor.

On a side note once this place is cleaned up and proper protection is in place the forum admins will still have to delete some spam posts themselves because the spammers will be testing the system and looking for holes by hand, experience has shown me that this is short lived because it is simply not profitable for them if it takes too much time to post and then it gets deleted in a matter of hours along with their account.

Good luck with all this.

[Halla]

If anyone attacks those IPs its going to result in some poor stupid user that has some malware on their machine getting attacked and saying "OMG@random hacker attacks!11!"

The best defense against forum spam bots is to delete them and NOT to visit the addresses they link to. Ignoring and removing them is the ideal approach because even spam costs money and if nothing is gained by spamming (site traffic/rankings/sales) then spamming will become a waste of money and therefore stop.

Thats my opinion on the matter. All you need are a few good trusted mods with topic deletion or at least profile edit ability... but being these forums are no longer regulated Id call it a lost cause overall for these forums at least.

edit:
As far as the parents sueing for minors being exposed to porn I hate to tell you this but its not the sites responsibility for user based content and that lawsuit would fail... and fail miserably. If that were the case I could use my kids as lawsuit machines and go post a pic of some boobs on a yahoo profile then sue yahoo cause my kids saw it, and do the same with AOL, MSN, myspace, facebook, every free hosting service on the net, every paid hosting service on the net... come to think of it anywhere anyone can post anything, including avatars, photbucket, imageshack and anything else.

As far as the pharmaceuticals go, as long as people BUY them they will find loopholes to SELL them.

Money talks. the more you have the louder it talks.
thats just the way it is.

[Make]

It is worth of time to check this article but since administrator of this board have disappeared for unknown time nothing will help. I hope that he still care about this site and board:

[url]http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html[/url]

[Ezekiel]

The best defense against forum spam bots is to delete them and NOT to visit the addresses they link to. Ignoring and removing them is the ideal approach because even spam costs money and if nothing is gained by spamming (site traffic/rankings/sales) then spamming will become a waste of money and therefore stop.

Most of the bot-spammers actually prefer it if you don't visit their site -- they are posting to increase their search engine ranking for certain keywords, not to draw in visitors from the forum. They prefer forum users not to visit because the forum people are likely to be annoyed at the spam and contact their hosting service to get them shut down, whereas people Googling for a related phrase are more likely to buy whatever crap they have on their website. Well, that's my guess anyway -- I don't know any spammers .

Thats my opinion on the matter. All you need are a few good trusted mods with topic deletion or at least profile edit ability... but being these forums are no longer regulated Id call it a lost cause overall for these forums at least.

Yeah, mods are the answer. In fact one admin has recently come back, but he has disappeared since yesterday.

It is worth of time to check this article but since administrator of this board have disappeared for unknown time nothing will help. I hope that he still care about this site and board:

[url]http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html[/url]

A very informative article. Perhaps something this forum's webmaster(s) should read.

[D.Parker]

Thanks for all your feedbacks. We've already fixed several issues on the forum, and surely will continue to make it better and more convenient. Currently we're focused on fighting spam and now are looking for solutions that would really work against spambots. If you have any - feel free to PM me, I'd kindly appreciate it.

[Ezekiel]

Thanks for all your feedbacks. We've already fixed several issues on the forum, and surely will continue to make it better and more convenient. Currently we're focused on fighting spam and now are looking for solutions that would really work against spambots. If you have any - feel free to PM me, I'd kindly appreciate it.

I don't know if it's been suggested in this thread yet, but 'textual confirmation' mods work really well against spammers. I've installed one on my forum and I get about 5 emails per day informing me of spam accounts that this mod has caught and blocked.

Basically, you install the mod and you specify questions only answerable by humans. An example: "What is the capital of Australia?". If these are not answered on registration, the account is not created.

I've only done this on PHPBB, but there's probably something similar for vBulletin.

[Moonbat]

mike951??
o_O

[Ezekiel]

mike951??
o_O

Yeah, I asked for a small username change.

I also became a moderator, but I thought it would be a bit egocentric to make a whole thread about it.

[Troll]

Yeah, I asked for a small username change.

I also became a moderator, but I thought it would be a bit egocentric to make a whole thread about it.

I thought you wrote your last post on this forum a couple of weeks ago? :P

The only way to fight spam is by have some active adminstrators which can delete spam posts as soon as they are posted... or install mods..

There lots of mods which can help stop spam (human validation, filter out spammy words such as "porn" and "drugs", etc..), but the best way is to have active admininstrators in my opinion..

[Make]

I still see a lot spam bots posting everyday on this board.
I'm Admin on popular proxy phpBB forum and i have installed a couple antispam mods and since then we never get any spam post. Actually the last 12 months not any spambot has bypassed board protection.
The posts from spambot on our board is 0%.

Spambots are coded to use well known weakness by popular board but if you install combos of a couple antispam mods you will reduced spam to 0%.

[Ezekiel]

I thought you wrote your last post on this forum a couple of weeks ago? :P

Yeah, I decided to come back.

The only way to fight spam is by have some active adminstrators which can delete spam posts as soon as they are posted... or install mods..

The moderators can delete spam as well as the administrators, so with three of us it should be easier. A forum modification would be better though, as you said.

I still see a lot spam bots posting everyday on this board.
I'm Admin on popular proxy phpBB forum and i have installed a couple antispam mods and since then we never get any spam post. Actually the last 12 months not any spambot has bypassed board protection.
The posts from spambot on our board is 0%.

I can vouch for that. After installing textual confirmation on my forum, I get several emails per day telling me that a bot has been blocked from registering. Just shows how many spammers are crawling the Internet.

[cadamd123]

I am new here, but to answer the question, yes I agree, give them a taste of their own medicine. Fight bots with a B0tNet. I will see what is feasible with given IP's, this seems to be a very informative and intuitive site, so I will do what I can to help it.

[Moonbat]

Actually, our forum installed an anti-spam measure a few days ago, and it's lowered the spam down a good number.

But we're still getting some. And I'll still update the list

[shahzadmasih]

Hi, this post is very informative; however I would like some specific information. If someone can help me then please send me a private message. Best Regards,

<mod edit>

[email]forums2@imzeeconsulting.com[/email]
[email]forums2@imzeeconsulting.com[/email]
[email]forums2@imzeeconsulting.com[/email]
[email]forums2@imzeeconsulting.com[/email]

202.142.171.232
202.142.171.232
202.142.171.232
202.142.171.232

SPAM ME!

</mod edit>

[Ezekiel]

Hi, this post is very informative; however I would like some specific information. If someone can help me then please send me a private message. Best Regards,

Just die, spammer. Right now.

Your businesses are doomed to fail if you have to use spam to attract customers. Successful businesses offer either a unique product or service, or a product or service at much cheaper price than others. Word of mouth should be enough if you are such a business.

Edit: god damn it, I just realised my post count moved off 1337 .