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  #1  
Old 5th October 2010, 12:40 AM
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Default New Anti-Spam / Anti-Hacker software Installed.

Hi Folks. We installed some new software yesterday (4th Oct 2010) to try and reduce the number of spam and hacking attempts against the forum.

This new software is quite aggressive against connections it believes may originate from attack scripts and hijacked PCs, so if you experience any strange behaviour - mainly by suddenly not being able to do things you used to be able to do (and quite likely accompanied by a rather terse error message) - please let us know so I can trim its wings a little...

Cheers, Bob.
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Old 5th October 2010, 01:33 AM
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Hmmm... I've detected a couple of major problems already (not the least being that it is locking me out of the forum...) and causing problems for Tapatalk users amongst others.

I have disabled it for now until I can resolve the problems. Apologies to anyone who suffered loss of connection during Monday p.m.
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Old 5th October 2010, 11:31 AM
Mike O'Pray Mike O'Pray is offline
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Bob, maybe you are seeing a lot more spam than we the users are but for what it is worth and if the anti-spam software gives more problems than it is worth, I for one can live with the very few attacks I have seen.

So far the spammers have stuck out like a sore thumb and if we are all vigilant and report then we can maybe knock them out almost as quickly as they appear.

One of the benefits of being a relatively "small club" is that our "I spy strangers" antennae are faiirly good.

Mike
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Old 5th October 2010, 12:18 PM
Dave miller Dave miller is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike O'Pray View Post
Bob, maybe you are seeing a lot more spam than we the users are but for what it is worth and if the anti-spam software gives more problems than it is worth, I for one can live with the very few attacks I have seen.

So far the spammers have stuck out like a sore thumb and if we are all vigilant and report then we can maybe knock them out almost as quickly as they appear.

One of the benefits of being a relatively "small club" is that our "I spy strangers" antennae are faiirly good.

Mike
The problem is much worse than that.
Without protection sites such as ours would be unable to operate. You have only seen a few examples because the software we use already does defeat so many spamming attempts. Our problem is that an increasing number of spammers are using sophisticated software that is designed to circumnavigate the barriers we have put in place, so we in turn must find even more ingenious methods to stop them ruining our fun. We are currently manually having to pick off an average of about two a day who are getting through the net, but that number is growing, hence the need for new safeguards, but such safeguards are of little use if they stop genuine registrations as well as the nefarious ones. The war continues.
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Old 5th October 2010, 08:29 PM
paulc paulc is offline
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In trying to upload an image to the gallery last night, I got told my IP address was going to get passed to the honeypot & instructed to cease my hacking attempt - Did save the page, but my temp directory gets wiped clean each day so can't recall the exact error... I did find however, that the image was held in a queue and after updating the descriptions, I was able to submit it to the gallery.

If I get a similar issue again, I'll email the support team and include the error page.
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Old 5th October 2010, 09:16 PM
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Sorry about that Paul, but it demonstrates the problems of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys using software.

I looked in the logs and see what happened: it was nothing you did, but rather the way the gallery software handles the upload that the anti-hacking software didn't like. It remains disabled until it can be tamed a little...

Our existing methods are stopping around 50-60 spamming attempts per day but we need to upgrade the levels of protection as it's an arms race...

Cheers, Bob.
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Old 6th October 2010, 09:55 PM
paulc paulc is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob View Post
I looked in the logs and see what happened: it was nothing you did, but rather the way the gallery software handles the upload that the anti-hacking software didn't like. It remains disabled until it can be tamed a little...
Once I found the image was waiting in a queue under my name, the 403 warning was downgraded to a minor grrrr. I fully understand the need for pro-active anti-hack safeguards, indeed, I'm even more aggressive in the measures employed on my personal server - Probe for vulnerable holes, or scan for non-existent directories, not just your IP address gets blocked, but the entire range assigned to the ISP. The vast majority of the banned blocks are of Chinese origin to date.

Carry on with the installation of anti-hacking measures, and if I get any problems (or break something), I'll send an email with a full log.
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