what is the point?

[kevinkk]

Good grief. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come. If there is something we as members can do to defeat this inexplicable and seemingly unjustified attack , I'm listening. I don't read russian for one thing, and I doubt many or any others do.
Why this site and not Actias? A big joyride for some twit, that's what it seems to be to me.

[adamcotton]

I just logged on and dealt with it. The perpetrator is gone and so are all his more than 200 posts.

Adam.

[Chuck]

Sign of things to come. Without a check at new member registration there’s nothing to stop it.

[kevinkk]

Sign of things to come

Maybe, I've never understood vandalism. I wish I was that easliy amused.I accidently killed a squirrel last night and I still feel guilty..he was in the flower bed, I don't know if a death sentence was appropriate, but it's too late now.

[livingplanet3]

I saw that huge number of spam posts, earlier. Certainly, it was a bot attack. Sadly, there are now bots roaming all over the web that spend all day, every day, just looking for forums to spam. I'm not sure if the internet is ever again going to be what it once was. It's calculated that bots now constitute about 50% of all internet traffic, and that around one-third of the bots are the BAD kind.

[lamprima2]

Dear kevinkk,
This line is offensive: " I don't read Russian for one thing, and I doubt many or any others do."

[Chuck]

This line is offensive: " I don't read Russian for one thing, and I doubt many or any others do."

I don't see how making a statement is offensive. I don't reach much Russian either, and very limited Thai.


These attacks and bots have various purposes, none of them good. Sometimes it's just to sell rubbish, sometimes to get people to click a link that downloads a virus. DDoS attacks may be tests, or may be directed to take a particular site offline. Nefarious accounts, once gaining access to a forum, may be generally dormant, or may watch then select invididuals to rip off. Bots are just automated versions that can generate lots of junk posts; that's only an inconvenience- usually there's another process running to try to find a way to take over a forum, which in the future may itself be used as a host to generate DDoS.

The first roadblock is deny access to membership. It can be as simple as "why do you want to join?" and if the answer is no good, they are banned.

[Jshuey]

I'm glad I missed this one entirely. A few months ago, I spent a couple hours deleting a Russian spam bots contributions. Just 20 or thirty posts - but this one sounds massive.

John

[Chuck]

Russian spam bots contributions.

John

FWIW, anyone can make the source look Russian, or whatever. I get spam all the time at work, and our security system is a bit advanced, it can trace the source better than this forum, and it's more often not Russia, nor Japan (like many are faked to be), it's China.

Not to fault our Chinese members; we are all scientists. There are nefarious attackers and bots everywhere.

[wollastoni]

Hello all, unfortunately bots are now plugged in with AI and they are very hard to stop from registering to a forum.
Chuck, they will now perfectly answer your question...

[Chuck]

Hello all, unfortunately bots are now plugged in with AI and they are very hard to stop from registering to a forum.
Chuck, they will now perfectly answer your question...

Other forums I'm on have manual approval. The mods report it's mostly "block" block block block, and every now and then a bot gets approved, but most are caught before they can post anything.

[adamcotton]

Luckily this time the same 'member' made over 200 separate posts in all the forums. I was able to delete them all very quickly, unlike attacks where a bot registers many different 'members', each posting only one or two messages. I remember battling one of those for several hours in 2018 and was only able to deal with it by e-mailing the admin so he could stop the attack.

Adam.