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We've had a lot of spambot posts recently which users have been quick to spot and report -- Thank you!

A spambot can easily be recognised by being a first time poster with a very new account, and the post will be a new topic and has nothing to do with wargames.

Standard moderation procedure with a spambot is to suspend the user account until the year 3000 and ban the IP address. The IP ban is actually done by Legoburner.

An IP ban will not prevent repeat spambot messages because they are usually sent from a big network of zombie computers with multiple IP addresses.

I feel like a good member now.

so the zombie wars are on... just not the brain eating people ones

BoW- John

Spam them back, I say! Shove Dakka down their throats. On to war!

As long as the IP thing is done correctly, and doesn't result in entire areas of the populace being banned. I know a friend who couldn't access 4chan for days because someone else on the same ISP was banned from it.

I'm sure Lego is cleverer than that though.

Heh heh... Lego basically told me to stop pointing them out.

I often find them before they post. There's one on the main forum page right now:

The newest registered user is johnyoung

You can see from his profile information that he doesn't mention any wargaming... sometimes it'll all be links to shoes or viagra or whatever.


You can see here that his website is some sort of random retail garbage. The link doesn't work, funnily enough.

I'm just glad I won't live to see Dakka in the year 3000...

As long as the IP thing is done correctly, and doesn't result in entire areas of the populace being banned. I know a friend who couldn't access 4chan for days because someone else on the same ISP was banned from it.

they likely did your friend a favor, that place is the festering donkey-cave of the internet.

I'll be on the lookout for any spam bots

I never got spambots...has anyone, ever, clicked on the link from a spambot? Even porn ones?

Still, they show up at every forum and Dakka is bigger than most.

Jon Garrett wrote:I never got spambots...has anyone, ever, clicked on the link from a spambot? Even porn ones?

Still, they show up at every forum and Dakka is bigger than most.

The most recent one from India actually sells something - a magical light of sorts, but the P&P for non-Indian consumers is abnormal.

I've noticed a lot of account requests from India on a Yahoo group I moderate (not hobby related). I guess as a region becomes more connected their presence in the zombie legion becomes noticed.

I never click on anything that looks remotely hinky.

Sadly there are people out there who are just too dumb to use a computer and the internet, I called these types of people the "general public"

They are the same types of people who really believe that some random guy who just so happened to get hold of your email address wants to give you £20,000 as a thank you if you help him smuggle £100,000 into your country merely by giving him all your personal banking data no less.

Last time someone tried that with me I emailed him back with a virus, no idea if it worked sadly

Most people here are proberly smart enough to know, that if you see a link to a website you want, type the address in yourself and not click the link. Just because the link says google.co.uk, doesn't mean its linked to that page, could be a mirror site or link to download trojan or anything.

I work in the ICT sector, so sadly I see this kind of thing all the time.

Responsible advisory:
Retaliation against spambots and zombies is judged by your local jurisdiction. Do so at your own risk.

Technical advisory - Responses to those emails usually get piped into a script and processed. A virus payload is unlikely to have had an impact.

MODS:
Is there a policy in place for people to get their IP unbanned after clearing an infection?

H.B.M.C. wrote:As long as the IP thing is done correctly, and doesn't result in entire areas of the populace being banned. I know a friend who couldn't access 4chan for days because someone else on the same ISP was banned from it.

I'm sure Lego is cleverer than that though.

I guess it was a dodgey ISP, because generally IPs have to be unique. ISPs have a range they assign either randomly or preset IIRC, those are the ones used over the internet. So either dodgy ISP or bad (good in this case) luck.

hellsguardian316 wrote:Sadly there are people out there who are just too dumb to use a computer and the internet, I called these types of people the "general public"

They are the same types of people who really believe that some random guy who just so happened to get hold of your email address wants to give you £20,000 as a thank you if you help him smuggle £100,000 into your country merely by giving him all your personal banking data no less.

Last time someone tried that with me I emailed him back with a virus, no idea if it worked sadly

Most people here are proberly smart enough to know, that if you see a link to a website you want, type the address in yourself and not click the link. Just because the link says google.co.uk, doesn't mean its linked to that page, could be a mirror site or link to download trojan or anything.

I work in the ICT sector, so sadly I see this kind of thing all the time.

All power to IT Support! General Public shouldn't be allowed access to the web for their own good. We supply our customers with AV software and the muppets still go and click on the rogue links telling them they have tonnes of viruses It's then down to us to fix it, and they moan about why we didn't tell them!!??!! WE DID!!! It just went in one ear and out of the other. They then have the cheek to say that they aren't IT people and it's not their fault... however they're bloody IT literate enough to go on Facebook, MySpace, online shops, Twitter and download music & videos!!!!

Wolfstan wrote:... It just went in one ear and out of the other...They then have the cheek to say that they aren't IT people and it's not their fault...

That's because IT is (in general) relegated to the role of parent to an idiot-child. Welcome aboard. Pour yourself a pint and join us at the end of the bar farthest from the darts.

Kilkrazy wrote:
Standard moderation procedure with a spambot is to suspend the user account until the year 3000 and ban the IP address. The IP ban is actually done by Legoburner.

We really should ban then until the year 40,000.

Oldgrue wrote:

Wolfstan wrote:... It just went in one ear and out of the other...They then have the cheek to say that they aren't IT people and it's not their fault...

That's because IT is (in general) relegated to the role of parent to an idiot-child. Welcome aboard. Pour yourself a pint and join us at the end of the bar farthest from the darts.

I can see why it's the furtherest from the darts
If anything there should be a wall there instead.

NEVER NEVER NEVER click on the links, especially the ones to Indian web sites. We have found on our site an abnormal number of virus and trojan infections related to the Indian sites. Not sure why this is but NEVER NEVER NEVER.....

Bartertown was getting a HOST of spambots until we upgraded our software. We now require a couple of extra steps that a spambot wouldn't try.
Spambot accounts are shackled tightly. LOL

Eric

Alpharius wrote:We really should ban then until the year 40,000.

In the grim darkness of the future, there are only Spambots. My theory is that the spambots became self-aware at some point, which is what pre-empted the Dark Age of Technology and resulted in the Imperium banning artificial intelligence.

Dakka gets about 3 full on hack attacks each day (all fail and are logged). WRT spam, the spam forum posts are the most annoying and need moderator attention so if you see them, flag them from a mod. Spambot members are not such a problem as they cant really do anything so dont worry about flagging them. At the moment about 50 spammers try to sign up each day. I get rid of about 30-40 through automated processes, but 10-20 are performed manually by spam companies rather than automated spam bots. Usually through indian companies but also US and to a lesser degree chinese companies too. All content posted on dakka is designed to not incur any search bonuses so all they are doing is pointless, and I clean up the dodgy accounts every couple of days with my nice 'exterminatus' button that deletes everything about them and bans their IP. Unbanning an IP is easy too and all it takes is contact with me (via a mod) to get unbanned.

I'm looking into some other options to block out spammers even more, but at the moment they are not a huge problem, just a minor annoyance. If it gets too annoying I'll add some more blocks, but never captchas as they barely work and I had a blind friend at university who would always be screwed by them, so have always made it my policy to avoid them for the sake of people like him.

Can I have an Exterminatus button too?

Pleeeeaaase?

I'm not sure... I heard you might use it against our users from the Istvaan system.

10 kudos points to all the mods on the site to keep the site clean of canned meat robots! Yay!