New outbreak of spam: what is going on?
 

I notice that there has been a new oubreak of spam in the fora - many with names like "Vashikaran mantra by baba ji" and "all type vashikaran astrologer" (I think that the point of these is the phone number embedded in the title, so I've omitted it...no sense in helping the ********).

The 'content' of the posts seems to be the kind of thing that happens when you cat sits on the keyboard or you sweep you fingers across the keys.

I'm just interested in what is going on; I know that there are already measures in place to prevent that kind of thing, so presumably someone has found a new way of avoiding them.

As I say, I know that there are some measures in place, so, from my point of view, this is just general interest. Obviously, it would be undesirable to give away any details that help the ******** do this more effectively.

I searched that number they are posting, seems to be random job titles involving love/marriage help all over the web (google has ~6000 results of spam), i imagine it's a premium number that would empty your phone credit rather quickly. The content of their posts is just to get past empty forms, their only intention is getting people to ring the number.

There's also the possibility they are trying to flood search engine results for some reason. Maybe to discredit the actual owner of the phoneline (ie; person googles your phonenumber and gets the impression you do alot of bollywood astrology, lol).

Taking a quick look at it, it looks like this type of spam is rather difficult to automatically detect as there's not "much" to go on as it's just a subject and the body is short and random.

Personally on my own forum I manually check registrations from known "spam" countries and the first 10 posts anyone makes from one of these countries also has to be manually approved.

jeremy has a more open policy here on LQ, fortunately the site moderators are usually pretty good at cleaning up the rare junk that gets through.

Haha, I saw it too. Vashikaran mantra in Hindi means a spell to hypnotize/control somebody. I laughed so hard. :D :D :D
Indian ISPs are infamous for their low level of security measures and concerns towards their users and this is the reason a huge part of Internet spam is originating from our ISPs. I've been even banned to register on PCLinuxOS forum just because of this. :(

Regards.

I feel your pain. I have many difficulties trying to use North American and European sites, because my ISP is in China. So understandably, I would not be very thrilled if my "first 10 posts had to be manually approved," because I live in "one of those" places. In fact, after the first two or three posts, I would probably leave.

As my forum is a motorsport one I've found that for most of the "spammy" countries there isn't a lot of motorsport, and anyone that is interested sticks around. Different forums, different userbases :)

And I imagine it is obvious such people are interested after two to three posts, yes?

In the few days since I joined, I've seen four "waves" of spam. The most obvious commonality is that they're all created in somewhat rapid succession in each wave (10 messages in 10 minutes).

I, myself, am not too fond of the idea of manually approving messages, nor think that's a very efficient use of the mods time. I also don't think cleaning up these message waves is something I would want to deal with if I were a mod.

Perhaps the powers-that-be can include a simple waiting period in-between topic creations for a given NEW user. Something like 5 to 10/15 minutes would probably cut down the wave.

We've updated a couple of our filters to automatically catch more of this recent spam wave. While our filters are pretty effective (they catch between 95-99+% of attempts depending on the day), spammers are a dedicated and resourceful bunch unfortunately. I apologize for the inconvenience.

--jeremy

edit: I'm getting too opinionated.

They are back again in full flight today Jeremy, methinks the spam filter may be taking a nap.

what about the following:
moderators and contributing members and .... are allowed to mark someone as spammer. From that point all the messages from him will be filtered out (to be on the safe side: for example five mark events will activate the filter only)

Group spam marking by mods (with potential input from Senior Members) is on the roadmap.

--jeremy

It's always an escalating arms race between spammers and spam filter programmers. No matter what the filters do, the spammers will find a way around them, at least temporarily. Personally, I just ignore the spam posts. It's not really that hard to recognize them from the thumbnail. On forums which don't allow a thumbnail of posts, it's more difficult to see them, but not impossible.