Lots of Spam Users Signing Up

[alledia]

Anyone else get a huge number of spammy registrations recently? I've been able to identify them in the following way:

1) Always a nonsense first and last name. For example ribkibiz / ribkibiz or sweetsuu / sweetsuu

2) They're able to register but never confirm the registration

3) Emails are all spammy .... gmail / .ru / .ws etc.

4) Removing the components / com_registration folder doesn't help.

5) The sites attacked by spammy registrations tend to have Community Builder installed but I've not been able to confirm that attacks only happen with CB installed.

6) Happens on 1.0 and 1.5

[miks]

I had been getting 15-20 of these a day until I pulled the site. I still dont know the exact purpose of these, so if someone could explain why these false registations are made, that would be useful. Is there an efficient captcha system that can be installed? I cannot seem to find anything that comes highly recommended.

[Chris B]

You're website has been posted on warez websites becuase the scrubbers there are planning on sharing you Bolt template, most likely where that craps coming from

[alledia]

Hi Chris

No - this isn't a problem on alledia.com but other sites that don't offer any downloads.

[holdencreative]

Anyone else get a huge number of spammy registrations recently?

Exact same thing is happening to me - and as I gather from checking both the 1.0 and 1.5 forums - a large number of other Joomla! users.

Many of them aren't able to differentiate between spam-bots and "hackers" so there's a number of posts which address the same issue without realizing it.

Here is what I can confirm :

- Community builder is *not* required for the spam-registrations
- Spam-Bots are signing up as 'unconfirmed' for both 1.0 and 1.5 installations.
- 3-15 bots/day, on average make it through
- Standard spam addresses - ie - .ru, .gmail, etc.

In terms of a fix :

- Captcha doesn't seem like it will work. One reason is that the bots seem to be accessing the direct URL of the registration file(s) and most captcha systems for registration act separately from these files. So the core problem isn't solved with captcha, in most cases.

- It has been suggested that the bots are coming from Turkey and Russia, but I can't confirm that.

- One idea is 'changing the registration URL' - which seems like a good idea - but I'm not aware of how to do that. Anyone?

...

Hopefully we'll get this solved soon. The bots are unconfirmed and cannot access site features - but - the sheer number of them will eventually present database problems for most installations.

Thanks,
HC
-

[adamos46]

do this:

http://www.joomlamafia.com/downloads/co ... ptcha.html

[holdencreative]

Thanks Adamos46,

I wasn't aware that anyone had updated Re-Captcha to work with 1.5 - I'll post the results in this thread - looks promising.

HC

[holdencreative]

**Update**

After installing the new Joomla 1.5 re-captcha, unconfirmed spam-user registrations are no longer occurring.

This solution does require patching/hacking a few core files, however, it's fairly minimal. I'm happy with it for now.
HC

[adamos46]

I am glad to hear that. re-captcha does the trick.

[snilloconator]

Well I have already installed Joomla Captcha 4.3 Stable + Joomla! 1.5.7 patches plugin! After I did this I forgot to backup my original files. So I would really like to get this to work before going back through all the files I need to find and restore. Would it hurt if I tried the above plugin with already hacked files from another extension....

Almost forgot joomla captcha is not working for me? But it seems there are more than a few that have it working and like it very much. If anyone can help it would be great.

[jason0512]

I have a tennis league website hosted by GoDaddy.com that has been up and running for about 2 years now. In the last 6 months I have been receiving about one, new unwanted registered user a day. They all have a .uk extension at the end of their email address. My web users all come from a small niche of players in Alabama, USA and these folks from the UK should have not business registering on my website.
On the admin side of my site, the .uk members show up under my users list, however it shows the number of times they have visited the site to be zero. That doesn't make sense to me and it is getting really annoying. Is there anything I can do to stop this? Please help!!!

[adamos46]

Didnt you read the link I posted above?

[miks]

Didnt you read the link I posted above?

That link is dead.

Jason0512- You are lucky. Here in the UK, I was getting 20 or more a day, mostly from Russia.

I found this captcha system beyond my technical abilities, so I turned off auto registrations and now do them myself through email requests. I would love to get captcha working but the lack of easy to follow instructions and beligerent attitude of the folk around here makes it didfficult for those of us who are not web experts.......

[bulgin]

holdencreative, re-captcha for 1.5? There is nothing at the re-captcha site mentioning a component/module for 1.5.x.

Where can I get it? Thanks.

[holdencreative]

I was directed to the files here :
http://www.joomlamafia.com/

But the relevant pages seem to be offline at the moment.

[holdencreative]

I was directed to the files here :
http://www.joomlamafia.com/

But the relevant pages seem to be offline at the moment, so I've attached the module zip file here. It contains instructions in PDF Form.

Please note : This open-source work/file(s) were created by JoomlaMafia, not me. I can't guarantee their quality or safety - so back up your site files first, as always.

That said, I've had no problems here.
- HC

[adamos46]

Thanks for the upload, I went to do in a friends of mine Joomla site and their website seems down for some reason. The instructions to install re-captcha in Joomla 1.5 should be a sticky.

[lga1983]

I installed the new Joomla 1.5 and I finish with the problem... thanks for the tips :-)