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Spam attacks from hell: Who's doing maintenance?

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Many spam messages were coming in today from bogus new users. They were advertisements for free movie streaming. I blocked the users in question and hid all the questions (I also deleted one user, but perhaps that was a mistake, I left the rest of the users blocked for analysis purposes).

Perhaps we need to disable new user creation, this is manual spamming. There is also someone taking the site down for maintenance, and I don't know if it's a spammer that hacked the site or Polarkernel, Dilaton, Dimension10, etc.

asked Aug 28, 2014 in Discussion by Ron Maimon (7,730 points) [ revision history ]
retagged Aug 28, 2014 by dimension10

As far as I know, the taking down was legitimate (non-admins are just not able to do this).

As for disabling new user creations, it's no good; they'll be able to post anonymously. But I've noticed that a particular option in the admin panel, specifically the one which makes anonymous/email-unconfirmed users have to solve a captcha, has gone unchecked. This may be (part of) the reason why such (seemingly automated) spam is still possible. I have checked the option back.

commented Aug 28, 2014 by dimension10 (1,985 points) [ no revision ]
edited Aug 28, 2014 by dimension10

Who did it? You clearly didn't, and it wasn't me. Is polarkernel here? Somebody hacked the administrative features, and they disabled the checkbox.

commented Aug 28, 2014 by Ron Maimon (7,730 points) [ no revision ]

It was me to set the site down for maintenance to stop the attack for a moment and to get more info about the attack. I temporarily suspended new user registrations, please don't change for the moment. More later by email, I don't want to explain here.

commented Aug 28, 2014 by polarkernel (0 points) [ no revision ]

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