Meet the spambots

[Miguel]

Yesterday, several new members registered but didn't activate their accounts. I suspected this was an automated attempt at registration by spammers. Today I looked at the signature lines for each profile and that confirmed my suspicions. See below.


NAME...............................SIGNATURE

[Miguel]

I've been deleting a half dozen bot accounts a day for for months. Yesterday, I made the mistake of accidentally activating an old, inactive spambot account before immediately deleting it. As a result, there seems to have been a four-fold increase in the number of attempted registrations.

My general feeling is that hackers and creators of such spambots deserve to burn in hell for wasting mankind's time for their own selfish reasons. I seriously wouldn't care if they were killed on the streets for their actions.

[midnightblues]

Strong words for the spambots. Thanks for not deleating me when I had those problums signing on.

[Miguel]

Sorry it took me a bit to activate your new username. I didn't know any action was required on my part -- I was expecting to be notified by email if there was.

[midnightblues]

deleting

[My Alter Ego]

Miguel, this site seems to be a lot of work for you -- or perhaps it's a labor of love. In either case, I do appreciate that you started and the effort you put into it to find new Haley tidbits. Thank you!

I've been deleting a half dozen bot accounts a day for for months. Yesterday, I made the mistake of accidentally activating an old, inactive spambot account before immediately deleting it. As a result, there seems to have been a four-fold increase in the number of attempted registrations.

My general feeling is that hackers and creators of such spambots deserve to burn in hell for wasting mankind's time for their own selfish reasons. I seriously wouldn't care if they were killed on the streets for their actions.

[Miguel]

It's a time-consuming distraction but not that much work. It wouldn't take much time either if not for the spammers.

Their bots are usually easy to spot . They usually have a nonsensical name or a name with numbers. They nearly always include a homepage linking to what they are pushing. Sometimes they have a signature line as well. Oftentimes they have an ICQ number.

To make them even easier to spot, yesterday I added a custom field everyone must answer when registering.

So now I'm getting responses like this:



There are other tactics I can adopt, but they generally involve modifying the templates. I plan to do them when I get the time.

[Miguel]

Just took care of two more. I realized though that if I ban them as moderator (easiest thing to do as that's how I'm usually signed in) they are placed in a group called "banned."

Then, as administrator, I can search by group to show all the banned individuals. This makes deleting them easier.

Before, I would select them by hand by looking through the entire list of members for those with a strikethough through their name (indicating they had been banned).

[midnightblues]

Miguel can you school me a little on the spambots? Do they pose as a threat to computer security. Whats there agenda. Thanks.

[Miguel]

Spam bots crawl the web and register wherever people can comment: blogs, message boards, news sites, etc. Then, just as they automatically registered, they'll automatically make posts that contain a commercial message/link.

Their goal is to get visitors from the sites they spam to visit their site. What happens there could be legitimate or simply a scam. Many of the bots seem to originate from Russia/Ukraine. Most likely what they want is for people to divulge their credit card information.

Some of these messages are more blatantly commercial and off-topic than others. You responded once to a bot that got through. I've changed the registration process so I don't think they will be able to post again. But since the bots blindly crawl the web that doesn't stop them from trying.