BINGO!
Just remember, spam accounts is a problem that even Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. even face. Of all that man power and money, they can't stop it, simply because it can't be stopped. Sure you can make the spammers have to jump through hoops to register, but at the same time your regular users are going to have to do the same thing. People already balk at having to register, so making it even harder is just going to kill off our website.
The only real prevention is coming up with a system to raise flags of suspicious account registrations and then have a person actually manage them. Outside of that, there isn't much more. That and making automation tools is a lot simpler today. Process a web page and CSS to make sure something is hidden or not? That used to require a ton of work a couple of years ago. Now you can do it in less than 100 lines of code in Node.js and PhantomJS. You can even easily trigger key events in order on the form to make it look like a human is typing things in.
It's just become a fact of life and something we all have to learn to deal with. I really think the next generation of spam combating modules that will provide the best level of defense are going to be more geared towards raising warning flags than prevention (3 registrations from the same IP in an hour? Require admin authorization on any further ones.), because prevention is so easy for these guys to get around now.
Jamie Holly http://hollyit.net
On 4/7/2014 10:09 PM, Walt Daniels wrote:
Correct! There is no possible fix for hiring real humans to register unless you have an out of bounds way of telling your friends a secret that they can supply when asked. It can't be something that the bad guys can find with an internet search such as the price of gold on Feb 3, 2010. It needs to something as hard as a hard password. At which point you may as well just register them yourself and let them recover their password to set it to something they know.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:43 PM, MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com mailto:mbr@arlsoft.com> wrote:
CAPTCHA = "_*C*_ompletely _*A*_utomated _*P*_ublic _*T*_uring test to tell _*C*_omputers and _*H*_umans _*A*_part" CAPTCHA doesn't necessarily imply sending a distorted image. It's any test that can distinguish between computers and humans. So, if the bad guys are able to hire humans on the cheap, then CAPTCHA has been broken in a way that can't be fixed. Mark On 4/7/14 7:28 AM, Philip_Wetzel@nhd.uscourts.gov <mailto:Philip_Wetzel@nhd.uscourts.gov> wrote:The CAPTCHA code has been broken a number of times and they've re-engineered it. If it's not currently effective, they'll probably come up with a fix. The game goes on. From: MBR<mbr@arlsoft.com> <mailto:mbr@arlsoft.com> To: support@drupal.org <mailto:support@drupal.org>,wdlists@gmail.com <mailto:wdlists@gmail.com>, Date: 04/05/2014 12:31 PM Subject: Re: [support] Many false applications for accounts Sent by: support-bounces@drupal.org <mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org> 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 <mailto: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> <mailto: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> <mailto: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 -- [ Drupal support list |http://lists.drupal.org/ ] -- [ Drupal support list |http://lists.drupal.org/ ] -- [ Drupal support list |http://lists.drupal.org/ ]