Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

steveee · 2009-07-22 7:01 pm

Well, first of all I'd like to say, hey to everyone, and I'm new here. I currently own my own forum/website since 2007, which is in my signature. I've read a lot of posts on here, with people asking how to stop these automated bots from spamming or spamming your membership list with website details located within their profile.

In my experience banning IP addresses/email domains with spambots is next to doing nothing to stop them - they will always come back with different IP addresses and more fake emails and domains. You'd pratically have to ban every single IP address on the internet to stop these things, and most of the time they can get past the captcha's in phpbb forums, especially phpbb2 and phpbb3 unless you set it to a difficulty setting that's even too hard for humans to make out! When banning full IP ranges, you also risk losing legit members. IP banning should be a last resort for most forum owners (just my opinion.) What you need is a method that actually stops them at the registration process.

I use to get LOTS of them every day on my forum back when we had phpbb2, and finally almost gave up on trying to stop them, until I got phpbb3 installed.

Here is some tips of mine, which has stopped them from going on my forum, ALTOGETHER since the beginning of this year (maybe 1 or 2 has gotten past, but it's better than dealing with 2 to 4 spambot accounts per day!)

If you own a phpbb3 forum or any other forum which allows you to create custom profile fields, do so at the registration screen. Make them compulsery to fill out, and create a question, a simple question such as the ones listed on my forum (make sure you pick different questions), it's very simple to do, and will STOP these bots from registering and spamming your forum.

For anyone that has Phpbb3 and wants to know more on how to create custon required profile fields in the registration screen, let me know, and I'll tell you how to do it. Another thing you can do, is to set accounts to be activated by the user, either by email (which is what I do) or by admin.

I never get spambots anymore, ever. It has completely blocked them from registering, because they can't get past different questions other than what they're scripted to do!

If I ever do get anymore, I will definitely submit their data on here, good work!

Gerk · 2009-07-30 2:33 pm

a tiny tutorial on how to do these fields for phpbb3 would be very welcome. We are getting quite hammered by spam bots (that never end up being able to complete the registration because they never get the email in order to complete the process). It's a pain to have to go and clear them out, not to mention all the "return to sender" mail bounces that I get from them. I'm a phpbb newbie and was really surprised that there wasn't even a pkg type setup for it for mods!

diabolic.bg · 2009-07-30 6:16 pm

You can try this - http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php .
I'm very pleased. The new version 0.4.2 check IPs in register/login/posting in SFS and hpHosts spam bases and many more...

#: 5127 @: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:49:42 +0300
Host: host-static-89-41-71-208.moldtelecom.md
IP: 89.41.71.208
Score: 1
Why blocked: No registrations, or logins, from hosts listed as hostile on http://www.stopforumspam.com/ . . 
Query: mode=register
Referer: http://wasteland-bg.com/profile.php?mode=register
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Reconstructed URL: http:// wasteland-bg.com /phpbb2/profile.php?mode=register

#: 5156 @: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:21:58 +0300
Host: 208.94.173.90
IP: 208.94.173.90
Score: 2
Why blocked: No registrations, or logins, from hosts listed as hostile on http://www.stopforumspam.com/ . No registrations, or logins, from hosts listed as hostile on http://hosts-file.net/ . . 
Query: redirect=posting.php&mode=newtopic&f=13
Referer: 
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; Creative)
Reconstructed URL: http:// wasteland-bg.com /phpbb2/login.php?redirect=posting.php&mode=newtopic&f=13

Last edited by diabolic.bg (2009-07-30 6:24 pm)

Gerk · 2009-07-31 4:59 pm

hi diabolic.bg

Thanks for the suggestion, but that won't help what I'm trying to do. I'm already blocking with SFS but these bots are all bots that are not on the lists.

diabolic.bg · 2009-07-31 5:45 pm

Gerk wrote:

hi diabolic.bg
Thanks for the suggestion, but that won't help what I'm trying to do. I'm already blocking with SFS but these bots are all bots that are not on the lists.

ZB Block check and stop over 100,000,000 bad IPs/Hostnames with heuristic mechanism, and personal data from domains and IP ranges. SFS and hph check are only one from new functions. You can add custom rules too.
Believe me - I use it from beginning. Try it and you be pleased.

Last edited by diabolic.bg (2009-07-31 6:45 pm)

nohoboy · 2009-08-28 6:30 pm

Gerk wrote:

a tiny tutorial on how to do these fields for phpbb3 would be very welcome. We are getting quite hammered by spam bots (that never end up being able to complete the registration because they never get the email in order to complete the process). It's a pain to have to go and clear them out, not to mention all the "return to sender" mail bounces that I get from them. I'm a phpbb newbie and was really surprised that there wasn't even a pkg type setup for it for mods!

Yes, please do. I have PHPbb 3.0.5 and I am getting 20 per day!

TIA

ManyQ&As · 2009-09-01 12:30 pm

In phpBB a custom field question works just fine. I know, I've done it and I have had no Bots get passed it. You can register on my forum, click website over there on the left, and you'll see how easy it is for a human to register, if you might be worried about that point.

I have a very basic question related to the sequence of numbers and a question I came up with.

Also, you should read the first page of this thread over on phpBB Community for instructions. http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi … &t=1437125

It isn't such a bad idea to read through all those pages, many you can quickly scan because it has stretched out to many pages, but it really is a good way to start doing the homework that's necessary to stay on top of the spam problem as it relates to their particular software.

But back to your question, a custom field question on phpBb 3.0.X works just fine.

Hope that helps.

diabolic.bg · 2009-09-01 4:20 pm

In my board (phpbb2) I have 4 level spambot defence (Unique_registration_hash, Textual confirmation, Birth date from dropdown menu and Stop_Spambot_Registration-1.0.2a). But since I installed ZB Block with spambot check in external DBs, my mods don't need to work. ZB Block don't give bots a chance.

zaphod · 2009-09-02 8:31 am

Well, ZB Block relies on the efforts of several other projects to do what it does. Stop Forum Spam is one of them.

I don't think ya need to pimp it so hard diabolic, it's still in development, and I still have the occasional botch.

Like my last botch, it didn't hit too many people too hard...

but did anyone realize, the word "cialis" is contained in the word "specialist" ?

One of my filters was looking for instances of that E.D. Drug in queries. It is common for bots to search on said name to see if a forum allows spam to remain, and if so, special attention is given to putting spam in that forum.

WHOOPS! Too strong a signature.

Another one was looking for the word "table" in HTTP_USER_AGENT as using "drop table" has been a fav. way to mess up MySQL via injection through the shoddy security of most website statistic scripts, and some other software too. This has led to many sites being hacked lately. So I decided that any injection was probably going to contain the word table.

Now I don't personally know anyone with a tablet PC, and I don't know why it's relevant to pass that data in a user agent string, and I had never seen a valid tablet PC user on my site before.

But, POW! Knocked a valid user on someone else's site into orbit because there's a "table" in every "tablet PC".

WHOOPS! Too wide a net!

So yes, while the program holds promise, it's still just in 0.4.4 beta.

Zap

P.S. I am not saying don't give it a whirl on your sites, but I am definitely saying it's not a perfect total cure-all.

Last edited by zaphod (2009-09-02 8:32 am)

diabolic.bg · 2009-09-02 10:00 am

diabolic.bg wrote:

But since I installed ZB Block with spambot check in external DBs, my mods don't need to work. ZB Block don't give bots a chance.

This is a fact. Before I had 20-40 or more emails daily from my defence mods for blocking spambot attempts. Now I don't have emails about. I don't saying it's a perfect total cure-all too.

malamute · 2009-09-12 9:08 pm

i have ipboard 3 and i have just setup a question.Thanks for the info people

#1 2009-07-22 7:01 pm

Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#2 2009-07-30 2:33 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#3 2009-07-30 6:16 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#4 2009-07-31 4:59 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#5 2009-07-31 5:45 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#6 2009-08-28 6:30 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#7 2009-09-01 12:30 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#8 2009-09-01 4:20 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#9 2009-09-02 8:31 am

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#10 2009-09-02 10:00 am

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

#11 2009-09-12 9:08 pm

Re: Advice on stopping spambots.. for Phpbb 3.0.5 anyway.

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