Spam!
By nedsram
Nov 21, 2009, 15:57
At the end of the last blog I naively hoped that we had now fixed all the issues. Sadly not. We had thought that by requiring users to confirm their registration and complete a "captcha" (a picture with random numbers and letters) we had defeated the spammers. How wrong we were.
We had overlooked spambots. These are specially crafted malware programs installed on the PCs of hapless users who haven't installed the latest security patches and/or have inadequate antivirus or spyware protection. Some send email to any email address they can find or manufacture. Others target forums. This is roughly how they work for forums.
First, they trawl the net looking for forums to infest. Having found a forum, they then manufacture an email address somewhere (often gmail.com or a mail server in Russia), and create a username that consists of random letters, and use these to register with the forum. The clever bit is that they incorporate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that can figure out the captcha and enter the correct letters and numbers. Once they have successfully registered, they then spam the forum. For now, that's it. However they will return from time to time, and repeat the process - with a different email address, username and IP address. (The IP address is how your computer is identified on the internet. The IP addresses used are faked, but if genuine would be owned by people in places like Russia and China.) Since all of these will be different every time, it's impossible to block them by banning the username, email address or IP address.
After fighting a losing battle against spambots, we have finally been forced to require users to be authenticated by an administrator (me). This has stopped new spambots. (Since we introduced this I have had 8 requests for registration, 6 from spambots, 2 from genuine users.) However I then noticed that many had managed to register, but for some reason hadn't posted any spam. I'm now faced with trawling through the user list, checking ever user, and removing any that are clearly fake.
However not all spam is created by spambots. There are real people out there that can't think of anything better to do with their lives than register for forums and post junk. One posted some rubbish about Vietnam earlier today. However we are gradually winning the war. I hope...
Oh and one last thing. In the previous blog I said that the new forums were hosted locally. Wrong. They are hosted in Dallas, Texas!
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