Depends where you live and if you trust your neighbors. On Jun 21, 2013 11:03 AM, support-request@drupal.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: How to safeguard sites from unwanted users (Jamie Holly)
- Re: How to safeguard sites from unwanted users (Kamal Palei)
- Re: How to safeguard sites from unwanted users (Jamie Holly)
Message: 1 Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:00:02 -0400 From: Jamie Holly hovercrafter@earthlink.net Subject: Re: [support] How to safeguard sites from unwanted users To: support@drupal.org Message-ID: 51C45C62.1040807@earthlink.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
The goal is to make it more difficult for people to register unwanted accounts. You aren't going to stop it completely. Email verification is just another hoop for them to jump through, one that is also accepted by a vast majority of regular users. It should always be used.
Something I did for a client last year was a custom module. It did a few things. First we could set the number of registrations per IP in a given time frame. After that the account requires admin approval. It also recorded all the request headers so that I could look for a pattern, which I ended up finding. Once I was able to isolate that, I blocked that pattern from registering, which took a client's site from a few hundred spam registrations per day, down to one or two per week. Per my agreement with that client, I can't give out that pattern, but doing something similar on any site wouldn't be that complex.
A common practice now is for companies to hire people to generate these accounts. They then use the accounts to spam your site. After that a company contacts you regarding the spam on your site, offering to "clean it up" and help your seo rankings. Very, very dirty indeed.
The interesting part of that is what we found out. The registrations were happening from IP addresses all around the globe, yet the actual spam postings were mostly from U.S. IP addresses and over 70% were from hosting companies that offer VPS. We were successful in getting one hosting company to shut down an account, but most just ignore it.
The whole morale of the story is vigilance. Things like CAPTCHA, email verification and keeping bad user accounts to prevent reuse of bad names and emails all give an extra layer of security (albeit not all that much). Or do you believe in leaving the front door of your home standing wide open, when you aren't there?
Jamie Holly http://www.intoxination.net http://www.hollyit.net
On 6/21/2013 1:56 AM, John Summerfield wrote:
On 12/06/2013 10:37 PM, Jamie Holly wrote:
+1 to that! Also, they can't reuse the email. Make it harder on them, not easier.
Reread gmail's rules about its email addresses. One can generate any number of alternatives for any one email address. Besides, unless one requires email addresses to be verified during registration, users can use anything at all, even fred@example.net or joe@domain.test (both of which _can_ be valid).
Email hosts often allow +arbitrarySuffix to the localpart of email addresses, but the "+" can be another arbitrary character, I've seen hyphens used.
And then there are some domains where everything is delivered, if not to a specific addressee then to a default address and that too is
configurable.
Message: 2 Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 19:45:03 +0530 From: Kamal Palei palei.kamal@gmail.com Subject: Re: [support] How to safeguard sites from unwanted users To: support@drupal.org Message-ID: < CALO8XuVd7N5-GyRPn6Ra_h_CyqRt8HgQXb391b47FDfXqPtVWA@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
I am thinking of below solution.
For my site, it is easy for us to find who are unwanted users using some mechanism. I am planning to write a custom module, that will allow administrator to list down unwanted users and these users references I will keep in a separate table , lets call it *table-a*. When a new user registers, I will check table-a, and if any entry found, I will use that entry's UID, for new user. Thereby over the time, anytime you see the unwanted users in my site will be less.
Best Regards Kamal Net Cloud Systems, Bangalore-08
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Jamie Holly <hovercrafter@earthlink.net
wrote:
The goal is to make it more difficult for people to register unwanted accounts. You aren't going to stop it completely. Email verification is just another hoop for them to jump through, one that is also accepted by a vast majority of regular users. It should always be used.
Something I did for a client last year was a custom module. It did a few things. First we could set the number of registrations per IP in a given time frame. After that the account requires admin approval. It also recorded all the request headers so that I could look for a pattern, which I ended up finding. Once I was able to isolate that, I blocked that pattern from registering, which took a client's site from a few hundred spam registrations per day, down to one or two per week. Per my agreement with that client, I can't give out that pattern, but doing something similar on any site wouldn't be that complex.
A common practice now is for companies to hire people to generate these accounts. They then use the accounts to spam your site. After that a company contacts you regarding the spam on your site, offering to "clean it up" and help your seo rankings. Very, very dirty indeed.
The interesting part of that is what we found out. The registrations were happening from IP addresses all around the globe, yet the actual spam postings were mostly from U.S. IP addresses and over 70% were from hosting companies that offer VPS. We were successful in getting one hosting company to shut down an account, but most just ignore it.
The whole morale of the story is vigilance. Things like CAPTCHA, email verification and keeping bad user accounts to prevent reuse of bad names and emails all give an extra layer of security (albeit not all that much). Or do you believe in leaving the front door of your home standing wide open, when you aren't there?
Jamie Holly http://www.intoxination.net http://www.hollyit.net
On 6/21/2013 1:56 AM, John Summerfield wrote:
On 12/06/2013 10:37 PM, Jamie Holly wrote:
+1 to that! Also, they can't reuse the email. Make it harder on them, not easier.
Reread gmail's rules about its email addresses. One can generate any number of alternatives for any one email address. Besides, unless one requires email addresses to be verified during registration, users can use anything at all, even fred@example.net or joe@domain.test (both of which _can_ be valid).
Email hosts often allow +arbitrarySuffix to the localpart of email addresses, but the "+" can be another arbitrary character, I've seen hyphens used.
And then there are some domains where everything is delivered, if not
to
a specific addressee then to a default address and that too is
configurable.
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Chris McAndrew