Strange spambot behavior

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jdwalling's picture

I am deleting hundreds of spam accounts each day
http://www.listology.com/jwalling/list/spam-patrol
Out of 200 new user accounts, 1 or 2 are not spammers.

Mollom and CAPTCHA are installed on Drupal 6.x

About 5% look like typical spam accounts with spam profiles set up by humans. Spam content is blocked by Mollom. 95% of the spam accounts look like spambot accounts.

Spambot accounts have randomized usernames like these

luannsrmllexvynvgcdj
michellc05ecjvpf
feliciariccieslrev
renaldozouchhxoaw
michelinevoszbxnxcz
louveniastrandxsr
marlysbarrazagu
reaganholmwoodrmj
justine19olgdiqrkav

About 70% of the spambot accounts are never accessed which means they can't be used to add content to Listology and therefore never trigger Mollom.

None of the spambot accounts post spam profiles or spam content. I assume Mollom is blocking spambot content but I am not convinced the spambots are even making an effort to post spam content.

Which raises the question about strange behavior:
Why would anyone register thousands of spambot accounts over a period of months for no apparent benefit? Is it just to be obnoxious?

I am considering Captcha Riddler to see if it would help.

Suggestions are welcome.

Comments

I have the same problem too -

Anonymous's picture

I have the same problem too, and I wonder how it originated. I wonder if my usage of any of the following would have triggered this spam registration onslaught:

enabling the ShareThis module?

using BOA for hosting the sites?

enabling the print module?

Are there any modules that when enabled are known to result in this kind of spam registration behavior?

ANy help on how to stop this?

Thanks

Honeypot module

jdwalling's picture

Honeypot module is a partial success but does not stop the "strange spambot behavior" because that spambot doesn't use the profile part of the registration form.
see my comment here
https://www.lullabot.com/blog/article/module-monday-honeypot

Final solution to spambot

jdwalling's picture

Spambot stopped when I made About Me field required when a new user account is created. The spambot never used that field.

I made the change 2014-10-09.
See spam stats here:
http://www.listology.com/jwalling/list/spam-patrol

CAPTCHA

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