Hacked by Kim Jong Un?!

jamie_c

Was the forum hacked today?!

Armelline

Not hacked, just a spam bot registering accounts and posting spam.

SlickZero

Yeah, he got us. I've been clicking buttons for about 20 minutes now. Just a little bit longer and it should be gone.

tatiang

@SlickZero said:
Yeah, he got us. I've been clicking buttons for about 20 minutes now. Just a little bit longer and it should be gone.

Same. Should be cleaned up in just a few.

SlickZero

Thanks for catching that ip, @Tatiang. Made things a lot easier.

MentalDonkeyGames

Seems like it's back again...

Armelline

Spam like this is very difficult to counter.

Ban usernames? They just make more accounts.
Ban IPs? They just use proxies.
Add "captcha" verification on account creation? Most bots can beat a lot of those now.

They'll move on to somewhere else soon enough.

SlickZero

Persistent little botstards they are.

Braydon_SFX

@SlickZero said:
little botstards they are.

I see what you did there.

jamie_c

I always have to wonder what the benefit of such non-sense is to those who post it?!

Armelline

@jamie_c said:
I always have to wonder what the benefit of such non-sense is to those who post it?!

They post hundreds of thousands of messages on tens of thousands of forums. I'm betting at least 50% of the people who saw the spam visited the URL out of curiosity. Even if 0.1% of those who do that register, it was all worth their while.

Armelline

If it's an option, I'd recommend making new members require verification. In my experience once that happens a bot will move on fairly quickly, and you should be able to disable the verification requirement again within a few hours.

jamie_c

So the end result is an attempt at ad income from the visited site?

SlickZero

@Braydon_SFX said:
I see what you did there.

Hehe. It looks easy, but it's not! :P

Armelline

@jamie_c said:
So the end result is an attempt at ad income from the visited site?

Either ad income or often the site advertises a crappy browser game that sells IAP.

jamie_c

As you can tell I'm not one of the 50% that follow the link... lol.

What a giant waste of time it seems.

Armelline

@jamie_c said:
As you can tell I'm not one of the 50% that follow the link... lol.

What a giant waste of time it seems.

It's the same principle as all those marketing leaflets that fill up your mailbox, except even more intrusive It works, else they wouldn't do it

jamie_c

@Armelline, it must... crazy though if you ask me.

UtopianGames

bimbi367 is now doing it :P Noooooo

Ed_Perkin

I thought my internet language had turned chinese paha

Ed_Perkin

And someone block these users somehow paha