Spam attack!

[Jarno]

This morning the forum was attacked by a spammer/spammers. Did my best on deleting spam topics and banning spammers. If I accidentally deleted any relevant posts, I'm sorry. Please don't shoot me!

 

[Jarno]

After 12 hours and deleting approx 90 posts and banning something like 20 members I'm heading to bed ... it's getting late in this part of our planet.

 

[blind watchdog]

Apparently we are still infested.
I received a PM today from a spammer with zero posts on this forum.
The time of the PM was within an hour of the perpetrator joining the forum as a member.
I just reported three more spam posts.

 

[John Flynn]

Jaysus Whats all that about?

 

[Muziekschuur]

I've been doing some cleaning too. Thanks Jarno.

Cheers,


Muziekschuur

 

[Jarno]

Jaysus Whats all that about?

That was spam. We're under spam attack. Been busy last 2 days with deleting posts (approx 150) and banning members (approx 50).

 

[John Flynn]

Oh God
How annoying
I hope it doesn't mess up this highly useful forum..

John

 

[Gravity Jim]

There is a wave of spam being generated through bogus, self-replicating gmail addresses right now, all of it pouring onto discussion forums. The MOTU forum I visit is getting ready to either ban gmail addresses or institute a feature that requires new members to answer a question, which the bots can't do.

What I don't understand is why so many of the spammers aren't selling a product, but seem to be simply copying and pasting whole threads from one forum into a few posts on another. This morning on MOTUNation, one of the bots grabbed a long political argument from one forum and pasted it across three posts on a forum about music software. Where's the gain in this?

Anyway, glad you got your CF card working.

 

[Jarno]

long political argument from one forum

That's the type of the post we saw in this topic. Other ones have been typical valium-viagra-i'm-a-lonely-girl-seeking-for-a-man stuff ... and one guy advertising e-cigarettes (who I banned 3 times ... and finally blocked his IP address).

 

[John Flynn]

Ok I get it. whatever means can be done to stop this need to be done i feel. I remember on the last tascam forum everybody had to pay one Euro to become a member. Would something like this maybe work here?

John

 

[captdan]

First, congrats to the intrepid Jarno for his late night battle ridding this stellar forum of interweb miscreants. Thanks Jarno!

Second: I've participated in online forums for over 12 years. I've never ONCE understood the idea that highjacking catagory specific discussions with ridiculous adverts and announcements benefits anybody - least of all the selfish goons who do so. If anything, they invite anger and antipathy for whatever foolish crap they're attempting to foist on the unwary. At very least they're uninvited party crashers; at worst, bunko artiists who should be hunted down, arrested and prosecuted for international crime.

Sorry for the rant. I've never been a fan of telemarketers, and I'm definately not in love with cyber creeps - no matter their motive.

CaptDan

 

[blind watchdog]

Many thanks, mighty moderators.

 

[Jarno]

Ok guys ... how about continuing talk about spamming at the right place:
Spam attack!

otherwise I'll have to ban you all

 

[John Flynn]

Yes Jarno Lets keep it Tascam on here.....

 

[DJ X]

They're not even real humans, they're spambots. I have changed the new user registration questions, that should keep the bastards away for a while.

 

[Jarno]

Tank you, Almighty DJ! Makes my and Frans' job easier.

And I can see you are already cleaning up the member database from obvious future spammers.

 

[DJ X]

Sorry you guys had to clean up all that mess yesterday. If this nonsense continues, we might have to migrate to a commercial forum package that comes with a spam management subscription. But I think we should be good for now.

 

[Jarno]

No problem! It was quite a job to keep forum clean, but sh*t happens. Nobody could have foreseen this kind of sudden attack.

 

[MixerMuse]

BEWARE: I received a private message notification which looked exactly like a real notification from Tascam Forums. I did not click on the fake links but went to the forum directly and checked my messages. There was no private message, the reported member did not exist and the culprit seems to be known as "prodawez" so DO not respond or click on any notifications from the forum directly unless you want a trojan horse or worse on your computer.

 

[Jarno]

Thanks for the info.

Checked my e-mail and found a similar message. Link in that one was a real tascamforums address. There was no PM in my inbox from this user "Tyncenemi", though.

But after comparing this message against another (real) PM notification, I found their tracking information was identical, so it was a real tascamforums notification. This leaves following options:
1. PM was deleted, when our administrator DJ X deleted this user.
2. I already deleted this PM, but can't remember, because I was just so busy hitting delete button during that day.
3. It was so advanced trojan horse/worm/virus/whatever that I have no clue what it was.

But people! As usual: be aware on what you click. Never click anything on your e-mail before verifying it's a legitime web-address (and something it claims to be).