Massive spam attack this morning

[bunnykins]

This morning I had over 1000 spam posts on my site. I am running cloudflare, latest ipb with it's spam protection enabled, and email validation.

Did any one else get a massive spam attack today?

 

[hostmything]

Its funny you posted this. I was just reading an article on google news that a new botnet has been distributing spam, and in massive quantities.

A new spamming botnet seems to be on the scenes, distinguishing itself with an extremely high spam volume, a great diversity of email subjects, and an amazingly diverse collection of URLs, mostly hosted on compromised websites.

Four of the top six spam subjects in the past 36 hours came from this new botnet:
• Obama’s policies affecting unemployed
• Change your life in 60 seconds.
• Recently got a job offer?
• Have you ever considered working on the internet?

When we used the Malcovery Spam Data Mine to review the sending IP addresses, we found that these messages had come from more than 23,000 different IP addresses. Just for the “Obama’s policies” subject, we saw 296 unique URLs advertised just this morning before 8:00 AM! Here are some of the Top URLs for that spam message.

 

[shockym]

I don't run it myself but I have heard a little chatter in the past month or two about it. Is this the first time it has happened, or at least happened on such a large scale?

 

[SolidShellSecur]

We disabled reCAPACHA and spam vanished from our forums months ago.

 

[bunnykins]

I don't run it myself but I have heard a little chatter in the past month or two about it. Is this the first time it has happened, or at least happened on such a large scale?

First time it has happened in several years. Although the last time I got attacked by spam it was not nearly this bad. Maybe a few hundred. Not a few thousand like this time. Hopefully this spam attack does not last as long as the last one. It went on for months the last time. I had to hire 3 new staff to keep up.

 

[hostfly]

Use captha option to avoid spam and also enable email validation

 

[bunnykins]

I do use those. The spam has been put to rest by adding an add on called stop forum spam.

 

[cpoalmighty]

Did you notice any change in activity before you got that SPAM? Any customer unhappy or such? It sounds as though it was targeted specifically at your site