Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts
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@mer the amount of spam the last few days has been insane.. I have never seen it like this before..
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@jwt yeah quite aware - these nutjobs have have to ruin a good thing for everyone.. I am trying my best to keep the forums clean, but every few minutes more pop in.. It is insane.. But it looks to be a real concentrated effort if you google the phone numbers they are posting.. They are like the top 100 results returned on google - just flooding anywhere they can post.. Forums everywhere are getting hit and hard.
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One application I use for ODB-II diagnostics on my Ford vehicles (https://forscan.org) requires a forum invitation code, which you can only get when you pay for their application.
Now that you have to register to download the installer (CE or +), perhaps the forum invitation code can be part of the registration process.
P.S. script kiddies are at it again already.
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@johnpoz said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
yeah I can see the IPs - and lots of vpns on the ones I checked.. But not just 1 vpn, ie saw many of the major vpn players
@johnpoz said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
on many a forum posts from all over the place in the last few days..
I mean a lot of different forums.. So clearly its not targeted at just pfsense forums.
@Pippin said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
OpenVPN forum has been hit also, close to 30000 posts the last few days.
That suggests the source of the spam has significant resources and has build the capacity to attack over a considerable time.
@Patch said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
I don't understand where the profit is in doing this. The motivations I can think of are
- forum filter companies justifying their value
2. denial of service attack by a product or country or political competitor. 3. advertising for service spamming. 4. the thrill of achieving a successful attack. 5. A bot error 6. An angry ex-customerWhich suggest 2. is the most likely. Perhaps a response to Russia/Ukraine or Israel/Iran or American politics
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Script kiddies are at it again. Can their mother please shout down the stairs to the basement to tell the trolls to knock it off?
We are loosing the Whac-a-Mole game. Mark Rober seems to be good at inventing ways to defeat carnival arcade games.
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@johnpoz Perhaps rotate the anti-spam question on new user registration. I wouldn't be surprised if they simply added that answer to any bot script. I'm presuming they aren't bypassing this somehow...
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@Popolou I have no control over any of that, just a mod.. Need to do something different, the amount getting through is insane
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I don't know if it helps but today I learned that one can only report 10 spam profiles per day :)
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@mer while reporting is good.. It can also turn into a form of spam for the mods and admins. If its a blatant spam post, ie its own topic etc.. and especially if there are bunch it more than likely doesn't warrant reporting.
What is good to report is those ones buried in another thread that don't standout as spam from a quick glance.. We are all aware of these spam floods coming in and you can't but help but know that they are spam.. Reports are prob best on those ones that they came back latter and added spam links in them and the like.. Even ones on old threads, etc. buried deep in the thread that nobody noticed when they were posted, etc.
Thanks!!
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@johnpoz said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
while reporting is good.. It can also turn into a form of spam for the mods and admins.
Good point, sorry.
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@johnpoz said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
Reports are prob best on those ones that they came back latter and added spam links in them and the like.. Even ones on old threads, etc. buried deep in the thread that nobody noticed when they were posted, etc.
Yup that ^. Those are the hardest to pick up otherwise.
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For weeks now I see messages like your IP has been banned, but if I reload the page, it still works. I changed from using a privacy-VPN to my ISP but I even get more messages like this. Now I have to ask, what should I do about it. It is a mild annoyance, reloading fixes it. But what else could I do. Should I enable third-party-scripts? Or is it just how it is, after all those spam-posts.
I get it, stopping those must have priority. But I m also curious, why not using a privacy-VPN makes even more (light) problems for me. -
Hmm, are you using a fixed IP?
There are a bunch of things in the blacklists but I don't think we added any after the spam flood. Most of what is there are used by VPN providers because, unfortunately, that's what spammers use.
But I wouldn't have expected your usual ISP to be listed.
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@stephenw10 My impression is and I have not talked about that with anyone else yet, that whatever I do, I get those messages. And reloading helps every time so it might not be an actual blacklist but something else with my Browser, what triggers this...
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Hmm, do you have load-balanced WANs perhaps?
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@stephenw10
No. My Browser is optimized for privacy though.
Still having that problem...Before and still I often get "Looks like your connection to Netgate Forum was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.", but not that my IP is blacklisted ([[error:blacklisted-ip]]), which it is not. But it seems like I am the only one with that interesting problem.
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I used to see the connection lost message but haven't for some time, like maybe 6 months.
You don't have dual WANs?
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@stephenw10 said in Fake Accounts and SPAM Posts:
You don't have dual WANs?
No, I am not JKnott, god bless him.
I have a lot of VPN Client-Connections (and Gateways) but I am not using them for this forum right now.
Edit: My connection goes through a SOCKS5-Proxy under my control. I don't know if this can be seen by the forum or anyone though. I hope not.
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Hmm, no the forum couldn't 'see' that. It also implies your traffic always comes from that IP. Unless the proxy is load-balancing somehow?
