The ***ALL NEW*** AUSubaru.com.au Forums

JUST HAD AN EMAIL SAYING SOMEONE HAD FAILED 5 TIMES TO LOGIN ON MY USER,
KNOWING I HADN'T JUST TRIED TO LOGIN, ITS OBVIOUSLY SOMEONE HACKING IT,

"The person trying to log into your account had the following IP address: 36.248.9.139"

longy99gt wrote:JUST HAD AN EMAIL SAYING SOMEONE HAD FAILED 5 TIMES TO LOGIN ON MY USER,
KNOWING I HADN'T JUST TRIED TO LOGIN, ITS OBVIOUSLY SOMEONE HACKING IT,

"The person trying to log into your account had the following IP address: 36.248.9.139"

Don't stress, you're not the only one.

Thread is here.

Cheers

Bennie

Thread is: online casinos ceydl in the Sandbox
Post is: https://www.ausubaru.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=26523
User: gedaGedsIrrance

Something needs to be done about all these “payday loan members” that have become very active on the forum... dunno if they’re human or bot.

There must be sixty or more of these posts with what appear to be links to dodgy websites (not going to try one of those FYI).

Looking forward to ridding the forum of these posts and “members”.

Cheers

Bennie

Yeah, I'm happy to volunteer my services as a Mod to keep that sort of gear of this valuable forum.

Me too!

I should’ve put my hand up last time mods were asked for. Most on the list have not been on the forum for years

Cheers

Bennie

Thanks for reporting.

Yeah I've been aware of this. There have been 1 or 2 every day or so popping up and I've been manually clearing them.
However we were just slammed with about 60 of them over yesterday and today.
I've just finished clearing those too.

The forum actually correctly identifies the new user as a Spam bot after a few moments and disables them, but unfortunately leaves whatever they managed to post behind.

Currently the forum is open for anyone to sign-up to (without any donation etc required).
There is a basic security requirement (please type in the funny shaped letters on the screen) but it's a really basic in-built one which spam-bots seem to be able to easily get past.
In the old days, an easy way to prevent this is to set the forum to require moderator approval before any new sign-ups become active.
I'm not really in favour of doing this because it creates admin work and dealing with spam is not something that should consume anyone's time on an ongoing basis - better to address the root cause.

The better way is to implement a better security screen (simple hoop for a human to jump through, just when first signing up) - we're going to put a proper one in, re-CAPTCHA which is one of the industry standard facilities provided by Google without licensing cost.
There's a time-spent cost for me to organise a web guy to upgrade add and configure a require plug-in to the forum but I will handle that.

Sounds goood AndyT!

Seems there’s been more bot activity since your post. Almost another page of unread post’s worth :/

Teething issue I guess

Cheers

Bennie

Yeah getting slammed today/tonight. Have cleaned it up again. Should be fine once the recaptcha facility is in.

Can’t wait!

There’s another six pages of spam threads to deal with:/

“Cheers”

Bennie

yes I cleared those too.

We had to do a full forum upgrade to allow the recapcha feature to be added for new sign-ups. This is now done (you might notice some slight visual and functionality changes) and recapcha is now in place. No new spam yet!

Awesome work AndyT!

The update looks sweet on the phone and is thus far very smooth to use!

Cheers

Bennie

Spam seems to have stopped. Bugger I was just thinking of getting a loan today, anyone got any good contacts?

Sorry mate I didn’t copy any links :P

One thing I’ve noticed is that a thread with many posts isn’t spread out across many pages anymore. Eg, Ruby Scoo’s build thread with ~600 posts is on two pages now. That’s A LOT of images to download each time!

Any way of changing this? I’ve only checked on the phone.

Also can’t see most recent post in each sub forum.

Cheers

Bennie

Well it seems it’s happened again - spam bombing of the forum in a big way.

Only 800 and something new posts. All that I can see are Russian spam posts on the first page of new posts...

Not good for the mods.

So human getting through the security setting then using a program to bomb the forum?? At least when I used to bomb the forum it was a person at the keyboard and it was Subaru related

Cheers

Bennie

El_Freddo wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 28, 2018 10:26 pm

Well it seems it’s happened again - spam bombing of the forum in a big way.

Only 800 and something new posts. All that I can see are Russian spam posts on the first page of new posts...

Not good for the mods.

So human getting through the security setting then using a program to bomb the forum?? At least when I used to bomb the forum it was a person at the keyboard and it was Subaru related

Cheers

Bennie

I agree Benny, it's almost not worth checking in here anymore, sadly.

Stay the course gents, I'm sure it will get sorted eventually.

I would suggest that membership is set to Admin/Mod approval, and set new members to require post approval for the first couple of posts.

you may want to delete this bot and ban the ip

https://ausubaru.com.au/memberlist.php? ... ile&u=9294

Yeah looks like 4 spam bots got in, they were probably initiated by an actual human for the initial account creation then left to run. I couldn't even delete them or their posts (unless I did them manually post by post) - they had over 5000 each and the little management interface I have just crashed out every time I tried. Had to get a guru to actually purge them out of the database.
Bit annoying but I can't really afford the time to switch it to a manual-approval process to constantly keep ontop of.

Any chance a couple of the regular/"oldskool" users are able to take on these tasks?

That said, I'd like a walk through on how to deal with reported threads in my build section. Toonga had highlighted one but on my mobile all I could really do was close or delete the report.

Cheers

Bennie