SMF Spam attack problem !!

I finally had to install reCAPTCHA on my sons SMF forum. Just today two spammers signed up. But luckily I caught them pretty quick.

Here is a link to reCAPTCHA for SMF - http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1044 I did have a couple of problems installing the reCAPTCHA add-on.

If anyone gets an error when installing that package:

Go to admin - packages - Cleanup Permissions - set all files to writable and click ok.

Install the reCAPTCHA package. Go back to package management and set Only the standard files are writable. Be sure not to skip this set. You do not want to leave those files writable. Get your keys from recaptcha.net

For anyone that wants to take a look, here is my sons SMF Team Fortress Forums To fight this invasion of spam, I am using recaptcha and email activation.

 

One more point I can add, please verify the site you're downloading modules from.

I've seen it before where cybercriminals will create an infected module, make it available and then drive demand for it by attacking the place it's needed most.

In this case, it's obviously a bot that's signing up on all these forums. If the cybercriminals had created or modified a captcha module and made it freely downloadable, then to drive demand for it they started spamming every forum they could find, they're sure to find some people that will download their infected module and install it thereby giving them a way in.

Like I said, I've seen it before in other situations so it wouldn't surprise me at all.

If you're Googling for a module, pick the original location not some random site.

That's all.

 

Yeah its always better download SMF mods from http://custom.simplemachines.org directly.

 

Or you could just use the package thing inside SMF.

 

I just wanted to update this thread with the results of installing reCAPTCHA on my sons site.

When reCAPTCHA was installed 2 days ago, the results were almost instant. Like I said in another post of this thread, so sons SMF forum (he is 14 years old) was getting hit with spammers, sometimes 3, 4 and maybe 5 a day. Even though capthca and email activation were both enabled, the spammers were still getting in.

After I installed reCAPTCHA, the spam stopped and it was instant. Over the past two days I have been watching the "whos online" list and have seen a lot of ip addresses that were connected to spammers. The SMF "whos online" list shows that the bot was trying to register an account on the forum. A few minutes later the IP address from the list disappears. Within 30 minutes - 1 hour, a few more IP address's show up, try to create an account, but are not able to and go away.

From the results of reCAPTCHA compared to the built in SMF CAPTCHA, its seems that the bots have been able to defeat the standard CAPTCHA phrases that came with SMF.

If your having a problem with bots, I highly recommend that you upgrade to reCAPTCHA as soon as possible. Now I am going to upgrade my other forums with the reCAPTCHA package as well.

 

reCAPTCHA is awesome software. I think every forum should use it.

 

Hi there,
I'm also running a SMF forum, the last few days I was very surprised from spam bots in the forum.

Seems that the Captcha image is not a problem for bots anymore , so I'm just installed this
Anti-Bot Registration Puzzles
and as i think- it works for now.