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Spam Service Update

Posted by Charles, 09 February 2011 · 471 views

On 13 January 2011 we posted some information on our Spam Monitoring Service that was helping to block the huge amount of spam accounts hitting communities all over the web.

There's not much new to report - spam will always exist unfortunately - but we thought everyone would be interested to know that we were recently able to block huge ranges of attacking IP addresses.

IPS has a hosting division that provides managed community hosting for many thousands of communities. We host everyone from small, hobby sites to large enterprise clients with thousands of online users. We manage our own network and hardware to have the best possible control over the experience we can offer our clients.

We have been able to leverage our hosted network of thousands of communities to detect the signatures that the spammers were using to get past the various defenses in IP.Board. The spammers were using automated software to, for lack of a better term, brute-force their way past the reCAPTCHA service and this program left clear marks in our server logs because of the unique way it accessed the servers. Our network staff were able to, across our dozens of servers, gather up all the IP addresses used to register spam accounts and add those to the block-list on the Spam Monitoring Service.

While this is not a complete solution we were very happy to be able to detect these trends and block those spammers at the service level so the knowledge we gained from our own network could be applied to help all those with an active IP.Board license.

Fighting spam is an ongoing battle of course but we will continue to do our best to help blocking those who would try to disrupt your community. The better your community runs the better IPS grows and we take our responsibility to your community seriously.




Thanks for taking the time to post this, spam is a terrible problem and it's nice to see you take it so seriously.
Thank you!
Thank you! :thumbsup:
Great job,

I wonder if the spamservice also has a function to block reply's made by guests? Especially as a few of them got though it and went into the moderation queue. Other than that I have had no issues with spammers at all  :lol:
Well done guys, great job as always :D  :thumbsup:
Thanks to the Spam Monitoring Service, spam registrations have decreased dramatically, meaning less headaches for us. Thanks for your hard work guys.  :thumbsup:
Overall this service is very useful. However, I have come across a few false positives recently, most notably when a web proxy of a major Singaporean ISP got blacklisted by the spam service. Is there a process for submitting such false positives for removal?

insectdude, on 09 February 2011 - 05:02 PM, said:

Overall this service is very useful. However, I have come across a few false positives recently, most notably when a web proxy of a major Singaporean ISP got blacklisted by the spam service. Is there a process for submitting such false positives for removal?

Submit a ticket if you get any false positives. We can then remove them and look into what happened.
The one place I've still been having huge problems is guest posting.  I normally like to allow guests to post but have had to turn guest posting off due to getting slammed by spam.  If an additional Q&A check could be added for guest posting it would really help a lot.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing them create an API to tie into WHM or some such to feed a list of black list's against apache which would just stop it there (or CSF)  by adding an authorized IP into the client center.. Huge amount of work, but would would have potential to create a much more solid enterprise experience

Robulosity2, on 10 February 2011 - 12:08 AM, said:

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing them create an API to tie into WHM or some such to feed a list of black list's against apache which would just stop it there (or CSF)  by adding an authorized IP into the client center.. Huge amount of work, but would would have potential to create a much more solid enterprise experience

The  problem is, the sheer quantity of IP addresses that would be added to CSF would slow your server to a crawl, as it has to check every incoming and outgoing packet against all of it's ruleset.

We did block, across our entire network, the IP addresses mentioned in this blog entry, but we couldn't do it for every one in the spam service.
With that being said, it might be possible that we could put together a script that performs the same checks we did, and reports them back to us for analysis.
Thanks! It really is a great service! Just bought my 3rd license of IPB and one of the main reasons I am building a new community with IPB is your spam monitoring, in addition to the performance of the script on my other 2 sites.

May 2012

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