Emails and forum hack attempt

[Soundman2020]

Did I ever mention that I hate spammers and hackers?

I've been mostly silent here on the forum for the last several days, as I've been battling a rather persistent spambot. I still haven't figured out all the details, but at least I have managed to block him/it.

He didn't actually hack the forum: but somehow he managed to use it to send a whole bunch of spam emails. A BIG bunch... At one point, I found over 30,000 emails in the mail queue! All of them neatly bundled in groups of 50. And the server churning away happily, sending them all out! Fortunately, I noticed within a couple of hours and managed to shut him down, but then he was back again a few hours later, and it's been a ping-pong battle ever since. Today, I think I have conquered him and blocked him permanently.... (I hope!)

The biggest problem is that Gmail, Yahoo and a couple of other email providers, detected the sudden flood from the server, and temporarily blocked us.

Therefore, you might not have been receiving any e-mail notifications from the forum about new threads, posts and topics, or replies to old posts, for the past several days. Those email providers seem to be lifting the restrictions a bit now, so you should start getting those notifications again, but please just log in to the forum yourself regularly to check on that, as some notifications might not get through. Also, check your spam folder, as the notifications might have been marked as spam by your email provider. You can also use the forum PM system to communicate with me, if you can't get through via regular e-mail.

I'll be taking further steps over the next few days and weeks to fix this even better, and "armor" the forum to a higher level, making sure it is able to defend itself more robustly against such attacks. I'll try to do that while it is on-line, hopefully without affect you at all, but if do find that you can't get in at some point for an hour or so, that might be because I'm doing maintenance on it, and had to take it off-line for a bit. Keep on trying!

So sorry about all of this! I'm really angry, and my hatred for spammers and hackers has ratcheted up a couple notches over the last few days... I can think of places where I'd love to send them all...

- Stuart -

[Starlight]

Source of the post... spammers and hackers ... I can think of places where I'd love to send them all.

Somewhere where each spammer and hacker has to read all of their spam emails aloud, all 30,000 of them, one after the other, and then the next spammer and then the next one and so on.

I feel your frustration as I once ran a forum (for people learning the Slovak language) for about 7 years and spent an inordinate amount of time playing cat and mouse with spammers mostly and one hacker. That was a phpBB forum, like yours, Stuart.

[Soundman2020]

Source of the post Somewhere where each spammer and hacker has to read all of their spam emails aloud, all 30,000 of them, one after the other,

Oh yeah! I like the way you think. It's so frustrating to lose days of time fighting those sniveling little cowards... (Did I mention that I hate them? )

- Stuart -

[shybird]

Ahh man that’s so annoying!! And what’s the point anyways?! I mean come on. Go home spammers geeze (or to the place suggested by Starlight...I like that idea lol). Sorry you are having to deal with this Stuart. This is such a fantastic resource. I know we all appreciate your efforts!

Cheers
Trevor

[Soundman2020]

Ahh man that’s so annoying!

Oh yeah! Big time annoying! And big-time "time waster" too. I'm not really a newbie when it comes to Linux and internet and software: (I cut my teeth on Unix, decades ago), but I'm no highly experienced expert either! So it takes time to figure things out, research what to do about it, then write the programs to make it happen. the good things is, I learned a lot of new stuff about hackers and also about Linux that I didn't know before, which makes administration of the forum easier (there's some really useful commands and tools in Linux!). The bad news is that it takes time!

But at least there's several new layers of protection in place now, and better alerting: I even found a way to get the server to send text messages to my cell-phone, if it thinks it is being hacked! Neat!

But yeah: hackers and spammers should all suffer a very long and appropriate punishment... As the Mikado would say: "let the punishment fit the crime"!

- Stuart -

[Avare]

Thank you for all your work.