My apologies for the spam everyone got this morning from user Astou4U, I got the same message too. The user has now been deleted.
This was not a hacking incident and our user database and user email addresses have not been compromised.
The spammer used a feature of the website that allows a personal message to be sent to all users, and when a user receives a message via the website an email is automatically generated by the website to inform the user they have a new message.
Adventure Riding NZ gets up to 40 spam registration attempts every day, thats up to 14,000 per year!
We have a number of different mechanisms in place to try and weed spammers out before they can create any havoc but nothing is ironclad and impenetrable, especially if we want real users to be able to register and use the site relatively easily and without huge delays in the process.
I know one spammer getting through is one too many, but 1 out of 14,000 is a very low percentage and I’m happy we have kept it that low so far.
If you see or receive any spam posts or messages let us know and we’ll deal with it asap.
Thanks and apologies again
Eddie
Cheers Ed. She sounds genuine though! Yeah right.
What its not real?!!! But Astou and I have something special.
Oh I see just sent you a message about this eh’…………………..
Keep up the good work Edward. If the only way a spammer can get through is to register as a user then you’re doing a good job. I can’t believe that after going to the time to register they would send such an obvious smap msg. Bahaha, I’ll send you pictures… lot of love… bahahahar.
I’ve had anecdotal reports that a spammer has registered and is messaging people again, if you have received one of these messages please send me the username that sent the message and they will be deleted immediately.
Being in IT, I know your pain well. We have several private mail servers for our clients, processing thousands of emails a day, and spam is still around 80% of the total.
As a mod on KB, I’m also blocking spammers there (at one point it was more than 50 a day), but KB has open registration, so it’s after the fact. Actually, similar to that, perhaps consider limiting messaging until they have a few posts on the forum? Just stops them trying to script a pile of dribble.
So we had another one of these over night
If you received a message or email from a user “docroberto” with a subject “get driving license, passport, IELTS, IDP, TOEFL, Whatsapp + 16465987593 (fernando.corso1@yahoo.com)” my apologies, the post and user have been removed.
As with the case above this was a spammer that manually registered to the site and sent out messages to members.
The only way to stop someone manually doing this is to disable all automatic registration and manually review every single membership request. Given that we can easily get 50 requests a day this isn’t feasible.
We had another one this morning that posted a bunch of spam topics for little blue pills, hair loss creams and things. All the topics have been removed and I’ve updated our naughty words list to include all the brand names of those pills I can think of.
The website is being targeted by spammers again though I don’t think any have managed to get through this time. We are getting 50 to 100 spam registration attempts daily which we are blocking, occasionally however this might also affect a real user.
If you are having issues with registering please email us at AdventureRidingNZ@gmail.com
Wow, just deleted 530 attempted spammer registrations from the last 3 days.
The spam registration attempts are constant and have recently been around 100-120 a day but yesterday set a new record of 950 in one 24 hour period.
The site is running under a brute force attack so I’ve put some rules in place in our firewall to try and deal with it. A lot of traffic was coming from the Russian Federation and the ‘stan countries so I have blocked those areas completely. Unfortunately though most of the attacks are coming from the USA, almost 1200 attempts in the 20 minutes before this post.
Another Brute Force attack today, again with most attacks originating in the US.