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What other ways of blocking users do you know? Imagine you have a website with your local town adverts and spammers manually keep registering to your side, conf
by varispeed 6y ago
What other ways of blocking users do you know? Imagine you have a website with your local town adverts and spammers manually keep registering to your side, confirm email and then keep account appearing to be used by a true user and suddenly start spamming. You block one account, find a couple similar then block them too. Then you get a complain from a user claiming to own one of those accounts. Let's say you ignore that. Few days later a new spam account "wakes up". You block couple similar accounts. Tell spam detector to block certain sentences and domains. Another complaint. Then another account "wake up", this time spam filter catches it, then spammer tries manually changing their spam until it goes through. You block those too and delete accounts. More complaints. Now other legitimate user complain that they cannot share a link or write certain sentences. Turns out spam filter is too trigger happy. You spend time to tune it. More accounts "wake up". This goes on and on. You find yourself no longer working on the site, but firefighting spam. You report the IP addresses used for spam. Nothing changes. Then you find out the IPs are from a couple of countries, that are not your town. You block the IPs. You get complain legitimate user on holiday can't access it. More accounts "wake up" - from new IP addresses. It is TOR. You block TOR. More complaints that some users cannot access, but other than that no more complaints about spam. Finally you can go back to developing your product.
It is simply not worth. I advice to block everything from various lists as the minimum. Countries don't allow people from dodgy places, websites should be able to do too.
People should be going to jail for spam. They damage economy. Big companies have resources to deal with it so they don't lobby to make law changes as it takes potential competition at bay.
- phil21 6y ago> You block TOR. More complaints that some users cannot access, but other than that no more complaints about spam. Sure, if this worked. But it's not 2010 any more. Simple stuff like this only stops the most technologically illiterate attacks. If your site is being attacked by more than bubba the local "computer guy" - they will be using proxies indistinguishable from your normal traffic, assuming you do any volume at all. It's just a silly exercise in futility. I put it up there with moving sshd from port 22 to a random port. Yeah, you get less spam I suppose, but it sure as hell didn't make you any more secure. Probably the opposite. Outright blocks of "bad IPs" are not that useful in my opinion. However, developing reputation systems around IPs and using "is tor" as one metric certainly has shown it's uses in my field of work.
- peteretep 6y ago> Simple stuff like this only stops the most technologically illiterate attacks. If 90% of spam that requires human moderation comes from those, this seems like an excellent starting point though, as indeed is moving your ssh port. Security is in layers.
- girvo 6y agoMost attacks in my experience over the last 15 years are exactly that, though: simple uncomplicated ones
- varispeed 6y agoOk so you bashed the method I used and you have not provided any examples how this could be done better. That is unhelpful.
- SahAssar 6y agoExpect blocking parts of the internet does nothing to help with this. You deal with automated spam on a website by restricting who can post or by doing automated human verification like CAPTCHA and having spam filtering. Just blocking parts of the internet does nothing to help the problem and simply introduces other problems.
- sbarre 6y agoBlocking parts of the Internet absolutely helps the problem. It doesn't _solve_ the problem, but it can reduce the amount of effort you spend dealing with it. Time is money, and for most businesses or people, this is the most important metric. If I can spend 5 minutes on an 80% solution, or 5 days on a 90% solution, I will absolutely start with the 80% solution and see how things develop.
- varispeed 6y agoThese bots were operated by humans. I tried many different captchas and that didn't stop attacks. In some parts of the world it is cheaper to get a human than the IP address. If you block addresses they have access to, it suddenly becomes not profitable to spam, because the IPs you have to get are too expensive.