Topic awaiting preservation: Are they getting smarter or am I getting stupider? (Page 1 of 1)

I just found out today that a spam bot has posted a whole bunch of stuff on my site. I cleared all posts based on it's IP address as soon as I could and then blocked the IP from my site. Now, how can I keep this from happening again without any form requring some sort of pass code? I'm also wondering if I can do anything else about the spam bot in subject, like report the IP address or something.

A total of 60 posts were made by the spam bot, 58 (news comments) of them were posted today, the other 2 (submitted links) were caught by google unfortunetly.

Uh oh... I just found 4 more posts from other spam bots...

You may consider to put a Captcha on your site and/or to grab a spam domain/url/email/ip blackList online and filter fields of your comment form.

Hmmm... I don't know... maybe a captcha is something I need but don't want. I should consider adding one to my site. Thanks poi.

I'll see what I can do, since I'm a GD freak.

You could take the Slashdot/Livejournal/whatever-the-heck approach and require the poster to type the contents of a dynamically-generated image into the form as a confirmation that they're human.

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Website

which is just what an image based captcha does.

honestly, just (randomly) renaming the field, or haveing to enter a text printed number does usually a pretty good job.
Most of these attack scripts are not that smart - and they will hardly spend time to work on your web page.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Thanks TP! I thought about randomly renaming the field names but I didn't know if it would help. That way the user doesn't need to provide extra just so I can see if that user is actuly a person. If this plan doesn't work (I'm not saying I'm not expecting it to work), I'll have to go with the captcha.

I tried random field names... didn't cut it. 20 some bots got to my site between when I added it and found it not working.

So I added the captcha which looks like it's doin the job. I made it from scratch, so let me know if there's any improvements that may help protect my site better.

Check it out here!

Was a Russian pimping pharmaceuticals and socket servers? I just had something similar.

___________________
Emps

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if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

Mostly gambling sites and meds, no porn.

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, no porn.

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" Game over man! Game over! "

" You are no match for Lord Gorlok! "

A couple of months ago, there was a bot running around creating accounts on vBulletin based systems. Totally automated. It would create the account, verify it, then start posting.

What a pain.

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zavaboy said:
I'll see what I can do, since I'm a GD freak.

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what's a GD freak?

GD is PHP's Graphic library. In GD 1.0 the accronym standed for "gif draw", and it stayed as the library grew and supported more formats.



(Edited by poi on 09-03-2005 13:31)

Zavaboy, A couple hours before dusk take your spam bot friend out for a drive along a quite country road. Pull over to the side of the road and shoot him/her in the back of the head. Dig a hole, throw them in an cover 'em up and move to Mexico and go on with your life.............just a thought. Tango

Tips.
use a small caliber weapon. a .22 is good for this kind of operation.
If you go down to Auto Zone today or tomorrow, they have plastic seat covers on sale for a good price. It will save you time on the clean up

Has anyone thought about writing a trap for these bots that kills them and sends them back whence they came ?

Preferably mailing thme back in small pieces. one at a time, or ransoming them?


Justice 4 Pat Richard

quote:

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Has anyone thought about writing a trap for these bots that kills them and sends them back whence they came ?

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yes



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

Rather than a complaint department , I was thinking more of a script that traps the bot as it enters your site and kills it, preventing the bot from sending you blank emails with bogus addresses and not allowing o\it to continue to search from there.
In my experience, complaining about recieving the results of a bot just lets them know they have found a valid target. The "enmasse" approach may work better, however.