It's been reported that the bad guys have set up CAPTCHA-breaking networks that distribute the CAPTCHA to people in third-world countries who get paid a small amount for each CAPTCHA they solve. It's looking like CAPTCHA is no longer effective.

I had to solve this problem for a site that was getting hit by about 15 bogus account-registrations per hour, even though CAPTCHA was enabled. The most effective approach I know of at present is to install a module that does reverse-CAPTCHA - i.e. instead of asking the human to prove he's human, it tricks the malware that's trying to pretend to be a human into demonstrating behavior that proves it's just a dumb piece of software. It does this by adding additional <input> tags to every <form> and making them invisible with CSS. A human won't fill in these fields because they won't be displayed. But software that's just parsing HTML will find these fields and fill them in, thus allowing the code on your server to distinguish between responses from humans and responses from machines.

Among the modules that implement this approach are Honeypot, Botcha, and Spamicide. I tried Botcha, but I ran into installation problems. I didn't try Spamicide because it had a critical bug report claiming that the installation erased the default/files directory. Honeypot installed without problems and instantly cut the rate of bogus registrations dramatically. It didn't cut it all the way to 0 as I'd hoped it would, but the rate dropped from about 15/hr. to about 3/day.

Mark Rosenthal
mbr@arlsoft.com

On 4/5/14 8:51 AM, Walt Daniels wrote:

I get them to, but it is not mollom's fault. They are actually registering and typing the captcha just like a legitimate user. In our case they even have to use a legitimate email as they cannot do anything more than an anonymous user until the verify their email. I don't see any pattern I could apply to the user names that would distinguish them from our valid users who have some pretty weird usernames. You could find or right a module that enforced using "real names", i.e. John Doe. But I even got some like that that turn out to be spammers.

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Linda Romey <lromey@gmail.com> wrote:

I am having the same issue. Have you contacted Mollom? That's on my to-do list. I'm not sure of the value of the monthly fee if I still have to continually monitor my site and delete spam accounts manually.

On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:09 AM, James Rome <jamesrome@gmail.com> wrote:

I have Mollom installed, but yet a handful of account applications
escape their captcha/analysis each day. The problem is that the only
obviously wrong field is the username, which is not listed as a field in
the Mollom configuration. I get names such as: qropspension_5362

Is there any other way to get rid of these would-be spammers?

--
James A. Rome

http://jamesrome.net

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