Ultimate Spambot Killer

[Admin]

Are your forums visited by spambots and your pages are filled with cellphones you never will buy, viagra and porn? Do you get a lot of bouncing emails?

Then install this vBulletin product - the most hated plugin ever made - to get rid of all of them!

PageRobot offers now the final solution, reducing spam-bot attacks by 99% and adding a (for us satisfying) frustration factor to occasional and professional spammers, giving them a really hard time as they never had before. While we are on one hand glad we got spammed so badly that we had to solve the problem, on the other we want our forums free of intruders with the only intent to disturb and share this new experience with as many forum owners as possible.

While spam was (and still is) mainly a problem for email, a raising number of Bulletin Boards are invaded by spammers, due to a number of reasons. One of the main reasons is the intelligent Captcha recognition system, which now is able to crack any system in a question of seconds. No matter how good the coming Captcha systems will be, it will take only a short time to beat them as well. The only true solution is to block access to persons, not to computers.

And this is what we do: we check the user's IP address (if given) and compare it to many world-wide databases (spamhaus, sorbs and similar). If the IP is listed in one of these libraries, the registration request is rejected and the IP is stored in a database. Then we try to connect to the mail server of the domain (after MX lookup) and initiate a mail session. If the mailbox is unknown, the registration request is rejected and the email and IP are stored in a database. If a spammer retries to register on the same or other Bulletin Board with the same credentials, they will be rejected once again without checking other remote sources, since a database lookup is cheaper and faster than any other solution. Also, each access renews the record dateline and increments a counter, just for some basic statistics.

More ...

Please download this product from here.

[Admin]

After the service is now up for about a month, the collected information from forum spammers show already some tendencies. Generally we see there are two kinds of professional spammers, the ones who don't even care if they are known or less, and the ones who care and try to hide.

The first category can be defeated quite easily, a small set of listed IP addresses will do just fine, but they are also only a very few and soon they won't find many wide open doors - the more people will subscribe to free or paid spam defence services, the more they will have to change their attitude. But of course, there will be always somebody who doesn't mind to get spammed - in the end they make a high number of posts and reduce the number of true forum users quite a lot. Outdated and abandoned forums are an example.

The second spammer category tries to enter generally with a first invalid email address and just jump off in case of failure. This kind of attack makes the lion part of all. When the spammers find out they will have to use a valid and working email address, for our service they are already late - if they register their email after having tried first with a dummy address, they get their "valid" email address rejected, too. This kind of attack take the second place.

Some spammers have learned the lesson and register first an email address, then attack. However, since it is quite some work to create constantly new email addresses, and is also increasingly difficult due to some new and constantly changing restrictions by the email providers, they try to use their addresses as long as possible. Most of these registering and spamming email addresses fall into a honey-pot and die miserably. However, most of these addresses are one-day flies, too, so in the end it will be too much work to continue on that road.

All of the spammers seem to be pretty uninterested if they succeed or not - for now. Only very few try hard to break in - rarely with much more success than increasing just a hit counter on our database.

Today I received a promising email spam, claiming they got the keys to open the doors to all blogs and forums. While this kind of spam would have made me fear some weeks ago, now it leaves me completely cold. Actually, I can truly laugh. Together we can defeat them, one by one and all together!

[Admin]

After we have added the saving of remote user data (hits, first and last usage date and time, IP and domain name) and manually analysed part of the records, we got the impression that the service is already widely used, but of course not registered (4 times more users).

We would like to see a higher number of installation hits on vbulletin.org (which also helps you to keep the software updated) and which make our product more known. Come on people, it's free, you use it, why shouldn't we get our count?

[Admin]

Looking though the logs, today I've noted some of the professional spammers have started to adapt, and register now their strangely named domains, instead of using fake ones. This means two things: first they find much more doors closed as before, and second, they spend money. And the more money they spend, the less they are interested into the business.

Please don't get me wrong, spammers can access tens of thousands of forums, and only about 50 are currently protected by our system. But ... those 50 were pretty interesting, ideal surfaces to sell their crap to a large number of forum users, because some of the sites are huge! Also, we currently have about 100 professional and 200 occasional forum spammers, who quickly feel the resistance.

[Admin]

The service is now running flawlessly for the past 14 days and count a constantly growing number of service users.

While we prepare to move the service to the final destination servers, we will make the server scripts also Linux ready. The only exception makes the DNSBL service which has to run on a Windows Server for technical reasons.

[Admin]

While the email spammers have been hard hit by obscuration of one of the largest spammer hosts, forum spamming has has suffered a noticeable boost. While about 70 % of the email spamming has come to a complete halt, the new frontier has become more interesting than ever. Not only because now hundreds of IP's are moved to history and become undetectable sources for most spam filters, but also because spamming forums is widely retained legal.

Only this weekend we have noticed about 110 % of new attacks by IP, which is a clear sign of the current spamming strategy. For the forum industry, this will be a major issue for the coming months and maybe years.

[Admin]

Surprisingly, it has worked out the USpam Service is being most useful to rather large organisations, such as hosting providers, software houses and military sites.

Over time, the number of medium-small forum users has significantly dropped, while it is increasingly used by the large structures.

For this reason, we will further optimize the service for large structures, and implement additional features which will allow them to maintain their services with more ease.

Forum users will be able to continue to use the service, but further development of the vbulletin product has been discontinued.

[Admin]

The Ultimate Spambot Killer has success!

From our General Statistics, we see the gap between service calls and blocked accesses slowly growing. This means, the attempt to make forums and sites spammer free is really working and is not just a slogan.

All it needs is the use of our free service and over time manual and automated forum spammers become very tired to hit the rubber wall... and this is what we always wanted

[Admin]

After a long time we get more smaller users, although the large sites have the biggest benfit of this service.

First Time Dateline	 	Last Time Dateline	 	Hits	 	Description
	2008-10-18 14:31:48	 	2010-05-19 16:02:51	 	313,580	 	Total registering or spamming attempts of blacklisted IP's
	2007-11-24 17:48:25	 	2010-05-19 16:16:00	 	466,996	 	Total registering attempts of blacklisted or inexistent E-Mail addresses
	2007-11-24 17:48:25	 	2010-05-19 16:16:00	 	780,576	 	Total lookup entries.
	2008-11-18 01:07:18	 	2010-05-19 16:22:03	 	1,931,860	 	Total service calls
	2008-11-18 01:07:18	 	2010-05-19 16:22:03	 	429	 	Total service users
	2008-11-18 01:08:38	 	2010-05-19 16:22:03	 	55	 	Active service users