Another Spam Attack - and upcoming actions

[Midgardsormr]

That's brilliant! I most definitely approve of that measure. I love the idea of turning a nuisance into something useful, and doing it completely transparently. That's got to be one of the most elegant ideas I've seen in a while.

[Robbie]

Yeah I thought it was rather ingenious...As soon as I did some searching on the vbulletin forums about spam blocking...I found out that vBulletin NATIVELY supports reCaptcha...I went ahead and signed up...and sure enough it worked.

[Robbie]

I just read...I think the spammer is using a script that tries all the accounts in the memberlist and tries to log in using the same password as their username.

Which basically means...if a user stupidly made their password the same as their username, it will eventually be found by this bot. I'm going to see if I can find code that will tell me what users on the site have done this...

So...if your password is the same as your username...change it now, or I may change it for you.

[Robbie]

There's a BUNCH of spam PMs from a BUNCH of users...I think they're compromised accounts...

I have turned off private messaging temporarily. If all goes well private messaging will return tomorrow or Monday...but I'm not comfortable turning it back on until the spam problem is solved.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Redrobes]

Let me know if there is anything I can do script wise to help out. I use one to grab errors from the error log and format up htaccess entries which get tacked on. Ok it bins some legit attempts to join that screwed up but it culls the spam bots severely.

[RobA]

Good luck, Robbie.

Spammers are a pain in the butt. On my home site blog I ended up having to block trackbacks at the firewall, not because they were getting them through (very good spam prevention in the blog software I use), but because the spam catching/processing was killing by CPU

-Rob A>

[NeonKnight]

Best of luck in eliminating the annoyances of the Web!