Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 1:09 pm GMT by Gogie
Don't know if this belongs elsewhere - if so, mods please move.
Has anyone else received an unsolicited spam PM from tipex71? I just got one and thought others should know about it.
Since he just joined yesterday and has never posted, perhaps he needs to be exiled to Siberia?
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Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 1:12 pm GMT by vyni
Can you forward/paste the pm to either sid or myself please.
Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 1:27 pm GMT by groton
yah i forworeded it to Geno
it was a tip on the Devil's vs Panquins game
Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 1:30 pm GMT by Gogie
| vyni wrote: | | Can you forward/paste the pm to either sid or myself please. |
You've got a PM.
Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:31 pm GMT by vyni
Thanks guys.
Got real intresting there for a moment (found over 7600 pms spamming that website!). We've got this one handled, and we'll be discussing best way of putting together a pm spam mod, without admins having to review the message text.
We've killed almost all post spammers, and we'll solve the pm problem just as well I'm sure.
Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:33 pm GMT by Adam Marshall
Ya, some sneaky russian punk spammed 7K+ users.
Here's how I know it so far. He tried it yesterday under a different name and I banned him with avengeance. He made another handle and now his bot is chugging along, blasting pms containing his sports betting site's link.
So we're going to change our private message system around a little bit. That message that already exists will be edited by a non-human script pretty soon, within a couple minutes says vyni. Also, a script is going to be running though future pms and checking for certain "flagged" words (I feel like the NSA all the sudden) and if they appear, the message will be nulled, or as I like to say, the message will be pwn'd in the face. So if you are discussing this incident with a buddy via pm, your messages might be deleted. 
Looking at our forum admin page, I can see a lot of people are checking their messages, and I'm really sorry about this. We'll be working hard to stop future attempts at this sort of attack.
We are also currently in the process of revenge.
I would never seek revenge on anyone, of course. Actually, I forgive that dick and I wish him well in his illegal venture. Cheers to our new friends at spartakbet.com. If you would like to discuss their products or services, I'm sure they'll be happy to help via support@spartakbet.com .
Posted Tue Feb 27, 2007 4:42 pm GMT by jimmer
| groton wrote: | | it was a tip on the Devil's vs Panquins game |
was the tip any good, or should i just keep tryin to make my millions playing poker?
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:16 am GMT by groton
i did not even see it was pro Pitt so it was almost Defently wroung i mean who would root for PITsburg
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:29 am GMT by General Sal
Wow, Vyni, I had no idea you had skills like this... can you tell me what wallpaper I have on my desktop?
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:51 pm GMT by vyni
My little pony, the one with the rainbows?
jk btw. I'm going to be scratching at the pm scripts through the afternoon here. Not as simple as the post spamming mods: we want as little human intervention in private messaging as possible. In fact, the aim is for none. We don't want admins/moderators reviewing/approving risk private messages as we do with posts for the obvious reasons: private messages are private and admins should stay out of them unless conditions warrant investigation. Spam is not such a condition.
Just a note for clarity: moderators and most admins don't have the ability to even get to the text of private messages without hijacking the users account. It takes someone with direct access to the database: currently that is only Sid and myself.
You're going to see captcha confirmations when sending pms that have links and/or references to domains in them. This will kill the bots, such as our new russian friend. What I'll likely do is create a store of domains found within pms: we'll then be able to review and approve/bar the domains/linkage from the pms without actually reviewing users private messages directly. If a domain/link is caught and is barred, the script will automaticly edit all pms containing it to a generic 'message removed as spam' sorta thang.
That's just an fyi for peeps.
Know a few were iritated by the whole thing yesterday.
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 4:37 pm GMT by Adam Marshall
| groton wrote: | | i did not even see it was pro Pitt so it was almost Defently wroung i mean who would root for PITsburg |
Careful...that russian mass pm idiot has me fairly pissed me off already.
Btw groton, Firefox 2 has a nice little spell checking function you might want to check out.
It doesn't catch random capitalization though.
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:51 pm GMT by raisebot
| vyni wrote: |
Just a note for clarity: moderators and most admins don't have the ability to even get to the text of private messages without hijacking the users account. It takes someone with direct access to the database: currently that is only Sid and myself. |
A little off topic, but since you brought up the topic, generally speaking, how difficult is it for admins like yourself to find out our passwords? I've always thought of it as a potential security threat that most forum users these days access multiple forums, using identical logins, indentical passwords, and likely identical passwords for other stuff they access on the internet as well (banking info, online gambling accounts, etc)...
| Quote: | | You're going to see captcha confirmations when sending pms - |
Don't rely too heavily on captchas, there are already programs around that can defeat these..
Posted Wed Feb 28, 2007 8:32 pm GMT by vyni
| raisebot wrote: | | Don't rely too heavily on captchas, there are already programs around that can defeat these.. |
Captcha, used here isn't an absolute solution. Like used in the post spam mods I built, they're more to knock a bot off track. 99.99% of the bots you'll encounter are generic, and not enhanced enough to detect and react to anything out of the ordinary. As seen here on thp, bot spam in forum thread has come to a complete halt. We still have a few manual spammers, but they're stopped/caught and killed quick.
The strength of your captcha images really comes down to what captchas you're using: if you abandon the norm, their effectiveness is greatly improved. The default phpbb captcha is soooo weak at this point, it's pretty much useless. We haven't changed up the captchas in thp yet, but will be soon. I did this for another forum that was seeing massive spam bots (Hi Geno), and with little modification it came to an almost complete stop. Theory is that if you run a captcha that's unique to your own works, it's pretty darn secure unless you're the specific target of the bots. If so, another mod kills that bot.... minutes to change captcha formats verses the hours or days it takes to write and perfect the new bot. Bottom line if you make the effort, they'll just give up at some point. Easier to fault a bot than build one.
As to password security: phpbb and most other forum/community scripts save the pass in the md5 encrypted format. Not readable, and decrypting one is not an easy or reasonable task either (easier ways to do it). Falls well into 'secure enough' lol.
But since you brought it up....
Everyone should always use different passwords from one community/site to the next. The end user has no assurances that their pass is truly secured. A few years ago, I had an incident on one of my own works where a user with admin level access used same pass across all his accounts. In the end, it cost me a database and some downtime as a rival site intercepted his login on their works and tried his login on mine... and it worked. A db that at that time, I had not setup regular dumps. Needless to say, I was ready to kill him because he should have known better. lol. That's also when I learned how flippin useless the feds are in such incidents, but that's a whole different conversation. Bad experience that I don't like to dwell on. lol
Back to topic, pm spam measures will be tomorrows project. We got a little distracted here with something else today 
Posted Thu Mar 01, 2007 4:22 pm GMT by Geno
| groton wrote: | | yah i forworeded it to Geno |
Sorry I didn't reply by the way (and everyone else who let me know) but my Internet went down 4 days ago and only just came back 
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