Bad time to be visiting.

[clifford_cooley]

Spammers are hitting the forum hard tonight.

 

[davehc]

I'm Chicken! I'm out of here for a little While!!

 

[Ian]

Thanks for the heads up guys, it's 6am UK time so only just seen the reports. All cleaned up, and I'll block them from coming back once I'm fully awake.

 

[Trouble]

Just got up from my easy chair and saw what you had accomplished.
Nice work on beating back the hordes.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Here we go again another night

 

[Trouble]

Watching and deleting. I've contacted Ian to let him know.

 

[clifford_cooley]

@Ian - I'm guessing you were making changes. I noticed the servers were down for about 30 minutes.

 

[Ian]

Unfortunately not - it looks like the automated server patching crapped out. Thankfully the server monitoring gave me a call (4am here ), so fixed that. Looks like the spammers have been persistent, but @Trouble has zapped them (thank you). I'll put more blocks back in place in the morning.

 

[davehc]

Back again today, but, quickly dealt with by someone - Well done!

 

[Saltgrass]

This sort of thing seems to happen on the Dell community site. One day multiple posts will show up with Chinese, I believe, writing and take over the forum.

What is worrying me now is I was sent a private message from what appeared to be a Dell site asking for more info regarding a post. A post I did not make. So I was just wondering, if the intrusion could be used for more than just adding a bunch of posts, such as looking for other ways to access a site.

 

[Ian]

I've had a good look at this and from what I can see, it's a semi-automated spam bot attack. It won't harm any users, it just clogs up the forum with spam posts until we can zap the problematic members. It looks like someone is manually registering from different IPs, then once the account is "clean" and past the first lot of registration spam checks, it goes automated and starts posting spam.

Every time they do this, I add more things to the spam filter to squeeze them out . Every few years or so I see similar things happening, it never lasts for too long thankfully.

 

[Saltgrass]

Knowing how it works is interesting. But you feel they are doing this solely for the purpose of cluttering up forum sites?

Does it make any difference to one of your users if they click on one of these spam messages?

 

[Ian]

Knowing how it works is interesting. But you feel they are doing this solely for the purpose of cluttering up forum sites?

I think they're doing this to drop link spam, hoping that it'll benefit them by having messages picked up by search engines. On other some forums, the messages will go unnoticed and slip past moderation.

Does it make any difference to one of your users if they click on one of these spam messages?

Nope, it's not a virus or anything troublesome, just an irritant and annoyance.