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Author: Subject: abuse of member registration
Polverone
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[*] posted on 21-11-2003 at 19:38
abuse of member registration


In the last few days usernames dominguez69, asercca, and xamarton1 have been registered. None of the three usernames has been used to post any comments. All have porn sites for their homepages; two of the three also have postmaster@NAME_OF_PORNSITE.tv e-mail addresses.

When I search Google for the usernames dominguez69 and xamarton1, I find a bunch of user registrations under those names on other XMB message boards. It looks like someone is using a script to automate fake member registrations on XMB messageboards to promote their porn sites. Goodbye, all three users. I couldn't find evidence of asercca being an automatically created account, but the timing is suspicious.

If I've deleted anyone's account in error, please register again and this time don't use a porn site for your home page. Madscientist, Vulture, I'd appreciate it if you'd also look at new member registrations and delete ones that seem to fit this pattern.

EDIT: Oh, one more casualty: yatamous18, who fit the profile perfectly except he had an online gambling site instead of a porn site.

[Edited on 11-22-2003 by Polverone]
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[*] posted on 19-3-2004 at 13:20


1freesex joined today, their personal website opens up with three or so pop ups and a "YOU WON!" message and is basically a porno site. You can guess that the name made me suspicious.



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[*] posted on 19-3-2004 at 13:34


Taken care of.

Thanks for the warning.




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[*] posted on 19-3-2004 at 13:36


I guess they are trying to increase hits from google by having lots of places where the email addresses are. Can you make a robots.txt file that prevents google from spidering the place where names are shown so it will make this useless? Or will that create other problems?



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Polverone
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[*] posted on 19-3-2004 at 14:27


I could make a robots.txt, but that doesn't prevent automated account signups. The person running the script won't know that sciencemadness is useless and therefore ignore it. We get few enough of these that deleting them manually isn't a problem so far.



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[*] posted on 19-3-2004 at 16:53


I dont know much about it, but can't you do what so many places do these days and have a little picture with a code you have to type in when you sign up, which prevents automated sign-ups (because the automated script can't read the code)?

Or is this too tricky to be worth the effort?
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[*] posted on 24-3-2004 at 18:30


LOL porn advertisments here too? Oh Mankind, shame on you!
Isn't the greed of people amazing? Porn has singel handedly ruined AIM, emails, and now is encroching on forums. I feel another complaint about the stupidity of man thread coming on....:D




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[*] posted on 26-3-2004 at 16:12


What you feel is a reaction to the allowed stupidity of men coming at you.



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[*] posted on 26-3-2004 at 16:18


I think einstein said something like that:
"There are two things that are infinite, universe and stupidity. I just don't have proof about the universe" :D




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[*] posted on 26-3-2004 at 17:02


Aaaah, it was Einstein. I thought it was me :(



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[*] posted on 12-4-2004 at 15:26
New member today


0 Manga X

Links to a German hentai anime porn site. The profile looked messed up on my computer so maybe someone already took down the member?
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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 15:37


New member amatlu lists his homepage in his profile as a porn site.
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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 15:54


Lately there has been a large flux of members using porno sites in their profiles. I was U2U'ing the moderators to tell them but it looks like they have been keeping a more vigiant outlook lately as they get deleted before most people see them. I've seen about 8 different members register in the last weeks using porno sites as their hompage URL. Possibly it could be set up that URL's have to be approved ?



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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 16:47
8 members in the last few weeks?


Don't I wish! I have been deleting more than 5 a day for the last few days. I wish I knew of a trustworthy, PHP-savvy member that I could task with making minor improvements to the board code (like setting up a bot-defeating registration page). Any volunteers? I would need you to modify/test a copy of XMB on your own server, then I would look over your changes, try it out, and update sciencemadness if/when your changes look good.



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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 17:54


Pity I'm Perl-but-not-php-savvy!

Otherwise I'd been glad to help.




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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 17:58


Make a list of the most used word then make a if statement or add something like this

Still looking for something else

[Edited on 11-5-2004 by Blind Angel]




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Polverone
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[*] posted on 10-5-2004 at 18:46


"Wife" is a common component of the pornspam user names. Other than that the names seem pretty random. That XMB hack wouldn't help because the bot just registers; it never tries to log in and post.



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[*] posted on 11-5-2004 at 03:26


i'm still looking for one of those hack where you need to fill in a random number for registring. Or maybe you could just change one of the field name used, like change "login" to "log-in" or something like that, they put all the data in the adresse after the ? (like /member.php?action=reg&login=xxx&password=zzzz....) so i you change the name of one of the essential field and the forum return an error you wont get any fake registration since it's mostly automatic bot which do that.

[Edited on 11-5-2004 by Blind Angel]




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[*] posted on 11-5-2004 at 04:33


Change the settings in a way that the "www" is not shown on every post, same for E-Mail and perhaps also the instant messenger.
Then block the members profile pages unaccessible for robots.

This should solve the problem as not every registered pornpage-user automatically generates hits at Google. Also automated mail collectors have it not so easy anymore. (I really dont need a bigger penis by now...)

Somebody interested to contact a member may go to the profile, on the board U2U suffices. (+ messenger maybe) Who wants his homepage visible may integrate it into his signature.

No information for the users is lost, a jump to the profile is the minimum I expect from somebody who wants to contact me by mail. (+ a certificate of mental health which suffices my definition of the matter)

Blind Angels suggestions are wellthought although as it is probably a robot made for generating searchengine/Google hits by abuse of XMB boards. Changing some small parameters should fool the robot.
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[*] posted on 11-5-2004 at 09:35


I have considered doing exactly what Blind Angel suggests, just changing a few variable names on the registration page. Then I have to make sure that doesn't interfere with the rest of the board; who knows what dependencies that page might have? That is one reason it would be nice to delegate the task to someone who really knows PHP. Perhaps I must take it on myself, though.

I don't think setting a robots directive will help. Spammer address-harvesters can just ignore the robots directive. I could keep the members page hidden from Google, and that would ensure that it doesn't boost someone's porn or gambling or cigarette site, but the bots wouldn't know that and would still flood the members page with crap.




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[*] posted on 11-5-2004 at 15:13
One old trick


is to replace the email addresses, the "Login" text etcetera with auto-generated JPEGs or GIFs et al of the text. There are several open source tools that do just that.

I think most spambots lack image-to-text capabilities...

[Edited on 2004-5-11 by axehandle]




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[*] posted on 11-5-2004 at 16:10
sure


But who's going to integrate it with the existing board software? I'm not. A good administrator is motivated to efficiency by laziness. I'm not yet good/lazy enough to think it's worth investing hours in modifying/testing the board code to defeat spambots or signup-bots.

I tried editing the signup thing this morning, but apparently the XMB templates file also needs to be edited and then somehow re-loaded (editing it in place didn't work).




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[*] posted on 12-5-2004 at 04:51
Blind Angel of course


He is obviously jeavily interested in the boards software, bugs, flaws and glitches that I can think of nobiody better for the job.
:D
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[*] posted on 12-5-2004 at 07:17


Don't look at me, I'm not very keen on modifying a non-open source product.... ok ok ok, I admit it, I'm just too lazy to do it :)



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[*] posted on 20-5-2004 at 12:53


I will be online only a little bit for a few days. Madscientist, please take a look at the members list and clean out the spambot accounts if you have time (Vulture, can you do this or do your powers not permit user deletion?)



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