phpbb2: IMPORTANT spambot issue and resolutions

[Please Register and Login to this forum to stop seeing this advertsing.]

[admin (no pm's please)]

771...

Currently we are clocking up ip bans at 40 an hour, that is simply not sustainable for network performance.

I think we may have to revert to short term bans.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

22...

Cleared the bans, seeing what happens with shorted bans, but tougher heuristics for instant banning.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

52....

So perhaps now 100 an hour, implying some of these spammers are on a continual loop persisting even when they were banned.

The check are now I think pretty much 100%, they spot and ban as soon as it can be done.

All we can do is adjust ban length to a balance between firewall load and taking the hit at the server level.

At that point if we want to get back to running and improving a forums service we have to just live with it.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

108...

give or take thats 1 a minute, on the basis of a ban time of  near 3 hours, we are looking at maybe reaching a max of 150 or so bans.

Meanwhile we have 30 or so "guest" on line, and the server is not going to balk at dealing with one spam attempt a minute!
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

Time to try and chill, a peak of 129 was reached, now it's 112, number of guests has varied from over 50 to 16 when I looked just now. That is not so far off what we would expect.

We are not being targeted specifically as forums system, so this is just one more problem all forums systems and even individual forums are going to have to cope with.

We are lucky in that we are a system and that we do run on dedicated servers, and do have the skills to cope. Coping has involved not only php code, but 200 lines of 'c' code, if you were running a forum on a standard host you simply would not have the tools to do this.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[Gosu71]

[admin (no pm's please)]

110...

When people toddle off to the "freedom" of running their own forums, I don't say very much as it would sound like sour grapes and probably they will be okay.

Running 1000's of forums is of course more work than running 1 forum, but not proportionally so, and I spend close to two working months a year on maintenance issues, including attacks. It will take me the rest of the week for example to upgrade phpbb3.

How many people *really* have the skills or the time to deal with it when a database gets corrupted, an automatic update goes wrong, or an army of spammers descend?
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[CodyT07]

Aren't you running an external/hardware firewall to ban from?
_________________
"Great minds talk about ideas, mediocre minds talk about current events, small minds talk about other peoples"

[admin (no pm's please)]

We don't disclose security details. Give someone the model of your firewall...
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[CodyT07]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Overnight we have gone as high as 175 bans.

I rather hope this will follow a path, numpties get the spamming software and think they will make money from criminal affiliate schemes, they will run the crap with the supplied forum list and parameters and lacking the work ethic even to work on this list they will find that the software reports back rapidly diminishing results until even they cannot be bothered.
Meanwhile they are too lazy to edit out the negatives in the list and hence we continue to get pummeled
The flaw to this is if this sort of crap just wipes out unprotected sites but they are left open giving these idiots the feeling that things are working for them.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

140... down from a 180 peak.

But I think this will just run and run.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

171....

I have signed on here:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

You can see our contribution at the bottom of the list here:


http://www.stopforumspam.com/contributors

It is rising fast. I will make it a priority (yet another one) to start querying their database when people try and register, I think especially on phpbb3 this will be useful.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

96..

We have well over 400 spammers logged now at stop forum spam.

But the numbers we are getting do seem to be dropping off at last.
_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums

[admin (no pm's please)]

101

With 857 spammers now reported.

---

_________________

Family Friendly Shareware | | Web Design/Services | Free Forums