24 ms·

Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

• sexmc10843 2y ago
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• 2genders1292 2y ago
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• 2genders17031 2y ago
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• 2genders15781 2y ago
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• jacobrussell 2y ago
  I thought the same thing! Very interesting. I wonder if this is happening on other sites like X/Reddit.
• swah 2y ago
  Why SEXMCNIGGA though? Shouldn't a bot try to pass as a user?
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• tadfisher 2y ago
  Obviously, yes.
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  Yep, guess the admins will have a busy day. Seems 10000s of accounts being created and used to spam ai sex bots.
  • geerlingguy 2y ago
    Luckily the accounts are all prefixed with the exact same phrase, which should make cleanup easier.
• geerlingguy 2y ago
  It sure looks like it; every front page post has a dozen or so comments from unique bot accounts. Hopefully we don't see a 'Show HN: I created a spam bot service to advertise on every HN post' soon.
  • rjbwork 2y ago
    Have also seen them. They all have the same name with numbers at the end. Also getting a lot of "sorry we can't service your request responses" this past half hour or so.
  • icepat 2y ago
    This very thread is under attack by spam bots...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • A_Duck 2y ago
    Already was : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39981911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39981911 Claimed at the time to be working on HN support
    • mtmail 2y ago
      I remember that website. I reported it to the moderators the same day and all related accounts got suspended.
• skilled 2y ago
  Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames. Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code… Amateur stuff. Never seen it happen before though!
  • riedel 2y ago
    Really wonder, if this kind of spam is the perfect application for an LLM based agent.
    • marginalia_nu 2y ago
      To be fair, this kind of spam seems like you could output it with a shellscript.
      • ataru 2y ago
        Do we lack a captcha here?
        • omoikane 2y ago
          I just tried logging in and looks like there is a captcha now. There wasn't one before.
    • hawkice 2y ago
      I mean, at least LLMs would have different text in different messages.
    • krainboltgreene 2y ago
      For what, the pure joy of burning money?
  • joeyhage 2y ago
    I’m also surprised that slurs/slang/foul language in usernames is allowed unless the server is overwhelmed and things are slipping past the validation.
• maximusdrex 2y ago
  Clearly, I'm surprised there isn't a spam filter that detects this obvious attack.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    or the bot is taking advantage of holes in the existing spam filter that haven't been exploited before
    • anigbrowl 2y ago
      Obviously you can't filter for every possibility in advance, but with a hands-on moderator and some regex it should be super-easy to throttle this. And as more than one person has pointed out, just shutting down new account creation/posting for 24 hours would be equally effective. I'm perplexed at how a mature site full owned and catering to network technologists is vulnerable to such a laughably crude attack.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        but then you've shut down account creation for 24 hours. The site operators get to choose how they want to play it, but it seems they don't want to do that just yet. You're right that it's laughably crude though. Says a lot about things that this hasn't happened until now.
        • anigbrowl 2y ago
          but then you've shut down account creation for 24 hours. But so what? The impact of that would be negligible, almost certainly less than that of having site performance go through the floor/become temporarily unreadable. It's not like a B2C product launch, and the target audience of HN is more or less optimally positioned to understand why one might deliberately interrupt service.
  • motoxpro 2y ago
    Seeing as there is usually no obvious spam attacks, there IS a filter. Assume competence :) https://paulgraham.com/spam.html https://paulgraham.com/spam.html
• Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  https://paulgraham.com/spam.html https://paulgraham.com/spam.html
• deleted 2y ago
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• troydavis 2y ago
  Yup. The site being advertised is proxied through Cloudflare, and they're also using Supabase. Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.
  • umvi 2y ago
    Any other possible actions we can take for punishing these sorts of bad actors?
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Unfortunately there's no proof that the spam accounts are linked to said site. If I were a competitor to the linked account and wanted to cause then damage, I could run a bot campaign purporting to be from them in order to get them kicked off their provider.
    • troydavis 2y ago
      That’s possible, and is why the providers investigate (using the account history that we don’t have access to). Often, other customer data - or a 5 minute phone call - is enough for the provider to tell the difference.
      • remram 2y ago
        You say this from experience? As a spammer or service provider investigator?
  • esafak 2y ago
    The founders are "John Smith" and "Jane Doe", and they're incorporated in Malta. Anyone who does business with this outfit has it coming.
    • johnasmith 2y ago
      Not all John Smiths are bad, promise.
• kertoip_1 2y ago
  So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots
  • wood_spirit 2y ago
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    • snakeyjake 2y ago
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      • pvg 2y ago
        Whatever the techbro religion is, it's seems to be lot less obvious, boring and common (at least on HN) than grandiose fearless-truthteller-of-strident-truths-the-sheeple-refuse-to-hear delusions.
  • Kikawala 2y ago
    Below submission had over 1,000 votes before being flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117443
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Arnavion 2y ago
    HN doesn't have any integrity about voting in general. Look at the "about" text of https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfishc https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pwdisswordfishc for example, and then look at the username. There is a whole family of pwdisswordfish* accounts btw. The "b" account's "about" text even has a holier-than-thou attitude about it.
    • tgv 2y ago
      That looks like a person, or a pretty good HNGPT. It's not your average spam. (Unless most comments have been deleted.)
• flemishgun 2y ago
  Is the GNAA alive and well???
• hatware 2y ago
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• owlninja 2y ago
  Yep, I am sure it happens but this is the first time I've actually seen it!
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  What we need now is the bot to post here and demonstrate a total lack of sense of irony.
  • herpdyderp 2y ago
    This has happened now. I count 20 spam comments at the moment, though I expect they'll get removed shortly.
• macintux 2y ago
  Per https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments the flood stopped 2 minutes ago.
  • joeyhage 2y ago
    It seems to be going in waves, and it also appears they are getting removed in batches.
  • busymom0 2y ago
    On this post alone, there are several of those comments after that. So, it's not stopped.
  • notRobot 2y ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%20Are%20you%20lonely%3F%20Do%20you%20want%20an%20AI%20girlfriend%20&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... For historical purposes Edit: nope, it's still ongoing, there are spam comments on this very thread from 2 minutes ago. The new comments link doesn't show dead comments.
• 47thpresident 2y ago
  At the end of each spam message there is a unique 15 character string. Anyone know what purpose the string is supposed to serve?
  • joeyhage 2y ago
    Poor attempt at trying to make the URL unique possibly and prevent it from being blocked. Someone could easily block the domain or use regex to block comments with that domain.
  • snthd 2y ago
    It's a hash buster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_buster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_buster
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• SEXMCNIGGA42232 2y ago
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• elwell 2y ago
  Has been loading slow for me. Also reddit seems to be down. And Google login on Twitter hung for me.
• SEXMCNIGGA23547 2y ago
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• SEXMCNIGGA14006 2y ago
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• buildbot 2y ago
  Interestingly, reddit seems have gone down about 30-40 minutes ago too.
• ergocoder 2y ago
  well ARE YOU LONELY? It might be a lot of spams, but it seems to come from a single account using a single sentence. Spammers are getting lazy these days.
  • omoikane 2y ago
    > single account I think that's actually multiple similarly named accounts with the same prefix. I believe there are rate limits on how fast a single account can post.
  • Hamuko 2y ago
    Impossible to be lonely with this many bots keeping me company.
• elwell 2y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things.
  • SushiHippie 2y ago
    > Certainly we can have nice things https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387562
• teensydata 2y ago
  Reminds me of when I was working for a university in early 2000s. I set up WebBB for a student organization to use and after checking back a week later it was thousands of spam posts.
• WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  Still going on btw. We're getting fresh hot new spams as I write this. Diff link in the text.
• spambot_12345 2y ago
  Yep
• wumeow 2y ago
  Kind of strange this is still going on. They’re all new accounts so why not just disable account creation?
• slater 2y ago
  They're back. At this point it might be worthwhile switching off new account registrations for a while?
• EveryPizza 2y ago
  They seem to also be spamming posts.
• 2genders23779 2y ago
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• zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
  Yeah, nobody here is going to go for that
• 2genders18592 2y ago
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• SEXMCNIGGA16125 2y ago
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• 2genders48014 2y ago
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• throwaway598 2y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=hi%20are%20u%20lonely%20want%20ai%20gf&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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• SEXMCNIGGA41803 2y ago
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• madcow2011 2y ago
  I laughed pretty hard when I noticed the same issues and clicked the 'discuss' link and found that your post had been inundated with the comments you are referring to XD
• deleted 2y ago
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• SEXMCNIGGA20835 2y ago
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• wumeow 2y ago
  It’s been happening for hours and is killing site performance. It’s all from brand new accounts. I don’t why account creation hasn’t been turned off yet.
• MrFoof 2y ago
  Would love to see a postmortem once it's dealt with.
  • krapp 2y ago
    This forum is built with early 2000s technology. It doesn't even use two-factor authentication or captchas for creating accounts. This was honestly bound to happen sooner or later.
    • mysteria 2y ago
      I don't want them to require a email/phone for privacy's sake, but they should definitely have a captcha of sorts to limit bot accounts.
      • KomoD 2y ago
        > but they should definitely have a captcha of sorts to limit bot accounts Captchas don't do much, they're super cheap to solve with services like 2captcha, capmonster, etc. You can get recaptcha solved for $0.6/1k, hcaptcha for $0.8/1k or cheaper. (email is pretty cheap too, but still more expensive than captcha solving) Requiring phone verification would be the most effective out of those because it's pretty expensive for the attacker, something like $0.02-$0.11 per verification is usually what I see
        • msm_ 2y ago
          I feel strongly about privacy and I always loved the fact that I can post pretty much anonymously on HN (I don't mean this account - it's pseudonymous at best). It's sad bad actors get to ruin this.
      • krapp 2y ago
        I don't know... Hacker News keeps complaining that they want the old 90's web experience back, now it feels like some shitty PHP messageboard from back in the day getting pwned by script kiddies. Enjoy the nostalgia while it lasts I guess.
• bediger4000 2y ago
  This is a old, very effective move from the spammer's playbook. If some entity protests effectively (penetrates the spammer's own anti-spam, anti-communication precautions), threaten to spam them harder. Then follow through. We're seeing some follow through, I reckon.
• thrwaway1337 2y ago
  It's the day after the YC application deadline, so my hypothesis is resources that would otherwise be dealing with these script kiddies spamming HN are spread thin at the moment...
• SEXMCNIGGA11473 2y ago
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• laborcontract 2y ago
  Site is effectively getting ddos’d right now
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• mysteria 2y ago
  What a mess, this is literally the first time I saw something like this on HN. They've even started posting on this thread! HN has been running slow since the flood started and I wonder if it's causing a mini-DDoS effect. The usernames of the spammers are "2genders<number>", "SEXMCNIGGA<number>", and "indianmilf<number>"; for some strange reason they keep the same prefix and just alter the number so it should be easy for admins to block them. Some of them are posting Twitter links as well.
  • rockpods 2y ago
    The reason is that they are just trying to cause chaos. They do not have any real goal other than that.
  • antifa 2y ago
    Agreed, they should ban Twitter links.
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• lwansbrough 2y ago
  Brave of this guy to link his Twitter. Quick way to get blackballed from every startup in the country.
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  • krainboltgreene 2y ago
    We have no idea if the author of the link and the author of the twitter account and the person in the image of the twitter account are in any way related.
  • EasyMark 2y ago
    it's likely just some randomly selected account that's real
• SEXMCNIGGA23598 2y ago
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• Bilal_io 2y ago
  Are you lonely and want to do something? Flag those spam comments. Yeah, I was surprised by the amount, it feels like an attack rather than spam. I hope this didn't interrupt Dang from something more important.
  • tithe 2y ago
    I'm doing so, but sometimes I can still see/reply to the comment despite me flagging it. Is a certain threshold of users required to flag a comment before it's removed?
  • paranoidrobot 2y ago
    For anyone like me, unable to figure out how to do that - you click Reply, and then there's a 'flag' link.
    • consp 2y ago
      Or click the timestamp.
      • anigbrowl 2y ago
        All these approaches increase server load. You're likely not the only one doing so, so the server has to respond to a read and flag request for every person. I'm not sure how many flags it takes to kill a post, something like 6 iirc. When you multiply that by the number of spam posts it adds up to a lot. I'm honestly perplexed that HN doesn't have any kind of string filtering facility considering its centrality in the tech ecosystem.
        • fragmede 2y ago
          it's never needed it before, and it's not being run by a huge team. it's hard to make time to prepare for a thing that hasn't happened before when you're busy dealing with everything else.
          • 2y ago
• mtmail 2y ago
  > Is it just me No, 1000s of bot accounts commenting 30+ per minute are quite obvious > Is it some kind of coordinated flood attack? Looks like it > And is an AI girlfriend really a feasible idea? It's the new penis enlargement and viagra spam
• Ancalagon 2y ago
  Should’ve used the AI to write better comments
• freedomben 2y ago
  HN also seems to be responding very slowly, and in a couple of cases timing out on the request. It may be under a heavy load.
• TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  There are apps currently make multi six figures a month with "AI girlfriend services". Not for me but it apparently is worth paying for to some people. But hell, one time I was scrolling through this hot person's Instagram and it took me a good minute or two to realize the whole account was a generative AI account, almost tricked me. Give it another decade and we can reevaluate.
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    https://microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ https://microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ with AI-generated people!
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• Olesya000 2y ago
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• nojvek 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115155 Yeah this thread is full of spam.
• indianmilf46251 2y ago
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• indianmilf42173 2y ago
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• indianmilf29702 2y ago
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• nojvek 2y ago
  IMO there is likely huge demand for bots that are witty and can write occasional put a useful comment with a link every now and then. It’s going to be interesting how spam evolves. At-least spammers who aren’t lazy. Already many of the recruiting emails I get sound a lot human. They are bots though since they send at 9am everyday
  • AndrewOMartin 2y ago
    https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Gmail's got a send at 9am feature for humans to use tho
• indianmilf1122 2y ago
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• leovander 2y ago
  I assumed the spam was trying to bury this via DDoS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117510
  • gnabgib 2y ago
    Doubtful: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-amazon-max-animation-exposed-server/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/politics/us-animation-studio-sketches-korean-server/index.html
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• crackercrews 2y ago
  Gives new meaning to "show hn"
• ricopags 2y ago
  Might not be a 'coordinated attack' so much as the consequence of a referral[0] program in the age of AI [0] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe52_7L-JqY6OqhL0FJICtmx2iNpCekzFMbWshlzwoJTa3BSg/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe52_7L-JqY6OqhL0FJ...
• varenc 2y ago
  Anyone have some insight into the motivation of spam bot behavior? It doesn't make sense to me that they'd intentionally re-post the same link on a story 100+ times. Perhaps repeating the same link is good for SEO farming? Or somehow there's a belief that 100+ identical comments is more effective than just a few? Also the comments all seem to end with a 15 character random string, which I assume is just there to add entropy and avoid identical comment detection.
  • troydavis 2y ago
    Just a guess: a teenager who learned to script and thought this was novel. This isn't an organized marketing campaign, it's a DoS with some links for amusement. Other than the volume, it's not even script kiddie level. Presumably they have access to proxy servers, though.
    • gertop 2y ago
      A teenager who just learned to script bested a forum for (and by!) the Silicon Valley elite? Shameful if true. But unsurprising.
      • salad-tycoon 2y ago
        Isn’t that every hacker lore story ever? It’s always David and Goliath. Script kid vs fbi vs nsa vs Microsoft/xbox vs etc. It’s an elegant story arc.
• deleted 2y ago
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• water-data-dude 2y ago
  Oh my god, you aren’t kidding. As of right now, there’s 350 (plus or minus a few) dead spam comments at the bottom of this page. Someone obviously misplaced a decimal somewhere - you obviously don’t want to flood a forum with THAT many bot messages.
  • Turing_Machine 2y ago
    I don't think we're dealing with the cream of the crop here. They're not even smart enough to have it make up new, plausible user names.
    • renk 2y ago
      Their IPs and emails might tell a different story and this could also be a threat. But to what end?
• jimmySixDOF 2y ago
  Thoughts and Prayers with Dang during this attack !
• deleted 2y ago
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• interludead 2y ago
  To be or not to be...