Mark's Blog

Another milestone clocked up for spammers across the world as the phpBB3 GD CAPTCHA has been officially cracked, causing an explosion of extra spam registrations and posts that most phpBB3 owners haven’t seen thus far. Unfortunately it was only a matter of time before the spammers’ automated tools were tailored to be able to read the phpBB3 CAPTCHA; however if you are keeping up with phpBB development you would have seen some interesting improvements going into trunk for 3.0.5 that hopefully will help with this spammer plague that we all seem to have come down with.

In another spammer experiment I’ve added another phpBB3 board with the GD CAPTCHA enabled on its default setting to the rotation script that governs which honeypot the spammers get sent to. The CAPTCHA settings are the same ones that are distributed with the phpBB (3.0.4) download package (GD set to on, foreground noise set to off, and X and Y noise set to 25).

Of course, I’d love nothing more than to present all of you with the opportunity to use bbProtection however we aren’t quite at that stage yet. However, now would be a great time to lend us a hand by contributing to our ongoing “bbProtection Needs You” campaign; more information available on that over at the bbProtection Blog .

While most of us are feeling well and truly stuffed from the mammoth amount of turkey and trimmings we’ve consumed over the afternoon spammers continue to unleash their rubbish on unsuspecting boards across the Internet.

Thanks to the invention of automated posting bots the spam barrage continues, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 365 (366 if we’re making the leap ) days a year. Let’s take a look at a couple of statistics from my honeypots over the festive 24 hour period:

• 40 spam accounts registered for the boards
• The spammers posted 35 posts over the 24 hour period in 30 topics

However most spam posted seems to be pretty automated, so maybe the head honchos of spam give the human spammers the day off; we can at least hope they do .

Well, it’s that time of year again; with Christmas just around the corner now is the time to spread a little Christmas cheer about the place .

Even spammers need some Christmas lovin’ ; thus I’ve installed a Christmas phpBB3 style over at the honeypot. It really is ticking over nicely now, around 75 new topics a day on average are created.

I’ve also spiced up my avatar via the help of a very useful snowman. Quite apt actually, considering the sudden downfall of snow that most of the North of England have been getting over the last day or so… lucky buggers, it never seems to get as far South as I am .

Remember to continue to spread the Christmas spirit, even in this “ZOMGWTFBBQOMG?!?!?!1one!!!1!11″ economic climate .