Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.
For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:
- Open sign-ups
- No captcha
- No e-mail verification
I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.
If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:
- Close sign-ups entirely
- Only allow sign-ups with applications
- Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups
Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!
Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.
Update: on lemm.ee, I have defederated the most suspicious spambot-infested instances.
To clarify: this means small instances with an unnaturally fast explosion in user counts over the past day and very little organic activity. I plan to federate again if any of these instances get cleaned up. I have heard that other instances are planning (or already doing) this as well.
It’s not a decision I took lightly, but I think protecting users from spam is a very important task for admins. Full info here: https://lemm.ee/post/197715
If you’re an admin of an instance that’s defederated from lemm.ee but wish to DM me, you can find me on Matrix: @sunaurus:matrix.org
Here we go: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/
API doc: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/
curl -X 'GET' \ 'https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/v1/instances' \ -H 'accept: application/json'Will spit out suspicious instances based on fediverse.observer . You can adjust the threshold to your own preference.
Nice! Would be cool if you could also include current statuses of captchas, emails, and application requirements.
Tell me how to fetch them and it will. ;)
I think the easiest option is to just iterate through the list of suspicious instances, and then check
{instance_url}/api/v3/sitefor each of them. Relevant keys of the response json aresite_view.local_site.captcha_enabled,site_view.local_site.registration_mode, andsite_view.local_site.require_email_verification.Since it’s a bunch of separate requests, probably it makes sense to do these in parallel and probably also to cache the results at least for a while.
It occurs to me that this kind of thing is better left to observer, as it’s set up to poll instances and gather data. I would suggest you ask them to ingest and expose this data as well
This should be probably pinned.
Agree
deleted by creator
Thanks for the heads up, StarTrek.website has enabled CAPTCHA and purged the bots from our database.
Starfleet takes changeling infiltrations seriously :P
This might be related but I’ve noticed that someone is [likely automatically] following my posts and downvoting them. Kind of funny in a 'verse without karma.
Karma may mean nothing but the information space is a strategic domain.
I don’t think it’s the case here, as I’ve noticed this after posts in small communities:
- c/linguistics (~240 members)
- c/parana (1 member - new comm)
I think that the person/bot/whatever is following specific people.
CAPTCHA is the bare minimum. Who the hell turns it off?
There is an argument to be made that captchas can be automatically bypassed with some effort.
OTOH, the current wave of bots is quite clearly favoring instances with captcha disabled, so clearly it’s acting as at least a small deterrent.
Edit: Forgot to mention this earlier, but the upcoming update to Lemmy will actually remove captchas. Discussion:
Sometimes, security just means not being the low-hanging fruit.
Doing no captcha is like leaving the door open, hoping no-one breaks in, instead of at least closing the door (a closed door decreases chance of break in by near 100%, even if it’s not locked)
Some advanced OCR can hack the easier ones, but it’s unusual.
It seems that the devs are considering to use mCaptcha. Link to the discussion
captchas block script kiddies at the very least
there’s a browser addon that lets you solve Recaptcha with one click:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/it automatically switches to the alternative accessibility option, which is based on typing in words that you hear, and uses speech recognition software to solve it. I’m fairly sure it could be automated quite easily.
Still way better than nothing at all
Any tips on how to get rid of all the spam accounts? I have been affected by this as well and thankfully captcha stopped them, but about 100 bots signed up before I could stop.
Normally i’d just look through all the accounts and pick out the 4 or so users that are real. But there is no apparent way to view every user account as an admin.
Did you figure out how to clean it up? You can see a list of users in your
local_usertable.I did manage to get a list of all users without a verified email using a postgress command, but sadly no, I can not figure out how to use the PurgePerson or AdminPurgePerson endpoints that are “described” in the documentation. I ended up just writing a small python script to ban all of them for now until I can figure out how to purge them.
It’s extra tough because user management in Lemmy is tied to posts and comments right now. Since none of the spam accounts have made posts, there’s no way in the UI to purge their accounts.
I’ll try to help you out in DMs in a minute, hang tight!
Fun fact, they’re removing Captcha in the next release.
I won’t be upgrading and I anticipate I’ll be defederating with any instance that upgrades to v0.18.
That is true, but because of the recent spam wave there is also an issue to re-add captcha. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200
We’ll just have to see how it all shakes out.
It was brought to my attention that my instance was hit with the spam bots regs. I’ve disabled registration and deleted the accounts from the DB. is there anything else I can do to clear the user stats on the sidebar?
You can do this by updating
site_aggregates.usersin your database (WHERE site_id = 1)
Sounds like a spez sponsored attack on Lemmy.
Or just the unavoidable spam bot accounts coming as long as it’s easy and the instance operators being still unprepared.
Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.
Yup, I noticed this as well.
Hopefully the mods of the instances will notice this and remove these accounts quickly! Despite this, I think the mods of all instances, and of all communities, had better brace themselves for incoming spam and hate speech.
One thing I like about lemmy was having to put in an application and waiting for approval. I knew I was vetted and others here were too.
Figure that alone could keep out most of the trolls and definitely the bots.
First Anti-spam service ready: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652
had to create an account to post since my comments from sffa.community and kbin.social weren’t showing up.
I’m an admin over at sffa.community. We did notice the bot wave. They never got past email verification. We hve since implemented CAPTCHA and have purged the bots from our database.
You can see we are down to organic users. We’ve only been officially open for a couple weeks so we’re still working on content but we are safe to federate with again, if you’d like.
Every time I see that moustache I know to pay attention!
I know from talking to admins when pbpBB was really popular that fighting spammers and unsavory bots was the big workload in running a forum. I’d expect the same for Fediverse instances. I hope a system can be worked out to make it manageable.
As a user I don’t have a big problem with mechanisms like applications for the sake of spam control. It’s hugely more convenient when an account can be created instantaneously, but I understand the need.
I do wonder how the fediverse is going to deal with self-hosting bad actors. I would think some kind of vetting process for federation would need to exist. I suppose you could rely on each admin to deal with that locally, but that does not sound like an efficient or particularly effective solution.
