Dear all,
I told you that I'd modified some software on our system? I built a honey-trap... some code that normal users will never see, but which catches out programs trying to register on our board. I noticed that spammers had found a way to get round the Captcha (the visual verification system), probably by getting humans to handle these, and were actually setting up e-mail addresses to be able to log in afterwards,
However, I did notice that these programs worked by skipping one tiny step that normal users go through. And that's where I built my honeytrap. I now detect if someone registering has gone through that step, and if not, I just deny their registration. And I log these in the forum error log. That's now been operational for a couple of days. The number of registrations per day over these days has halved...
The number of honey-trapped registrations (which were on the increase over the last period) in the last 24 hours was 60! These came from a small, but again increasing number of IP addresses (meaning that the bot-network, the network of PC's used to perform these attacks, is increasing).
For your information, once people have spammed the forum, I place their username, e-mail address and IP address on a ban list. Then I delete their account, all their posts and all their messages. We still have an increasing number of attempts per day attempting to send spam PM's, but they are now stopped at the gate.
The net result: I hope there will be less spam now. But do use the Report to Moderator function if you receive spam.
Peter
