Private Message from Nate directing to Quandra forums?

2009-05-08 07:08:22 pm

Metroid Exp: Exploration - Great, Skills - Decent

Hello Lawrence Reyome,

You have received a new private message to your account on "Metroid 2002" and you have requested that you be notified on this event. You can view your new message by clicking on the following link:

http://m2k2.quandra.org/forum/privmsg.php?folder=inbox

Pretty much says it all eh??

Thread title:

nate

2009-05-08 07:51:33 pm

it was just a spambot. i've disabled new registrations completely on the old board. i apologize for the inconvenience.

Daniel, Lord Bahamut

2009-05-10 02:59:32 am

Mega Flare

I got it too. Thought I might have been phished, so I changed my password. I would recommend that to anyone who got the pm.

arkarian

2009-05-10 10:20:27 am

red chamber dream

why? it's just a spambot; has nothing to do with your account.

Daniel, Lord Bahamut

2009-05-10 01:40:29 pm

Mega Flare

Better safe than sorry.

nate

2009-05-10 03:01:42 pm

fork, you have to remember that most people have never seen the old forum hosted there before and may have no idea that i own quandra.org.

Tzyr

2009-05-10 03:23:01 pm

I know I didn't. I just did not log into it in case it was a phisher.

I just went through nate's main site to the forum; so as long as you did not log in, you would have been fine.

Eh?

heh funny lil guy

Good to see you've not gone too crazy nate.

arkarian

2009-05-10 03:28:38 pm

red chamber dream

Quote from nate:

fork, you have to remember that most people have never seen the old forum hosted there before and may have no idea that i own quandra.org.

yeah true. i need to get out more.

SkippyJr

2009-05-10 05:34:00 pm

There are 100 additional accounts registered after the closure date. With most of the new registrations occuring in 2009, one may guess that the spambots are getting smarter. Were any of DJGrenola's spambot countermeasures made back then and put in place before it closed?

DJGrenola

2009-05-10 05:41:22 pm

Did you apply that patch to the quandra installation nate? (I could examine the HTML, but I'm lazy.)

nate

2009-05-11 01:25:58 am

it's been so long my memory is hazy but i thought that was just the old forum exactly as it was, untouched. remember that we're on dl now.

Quote from SkippyJr:

There are 100 additional accounts registered after the closure date. With most of the new registrations occuring in 2009, one may guess that the spambots are getting smarter. Were any of DJGrenola's spambot countermeasures made back then and put in place before it closed?

this is exactly why i said someone probably wrote a heuristic to get the field names by their human-visibility or else (highly unlikely) they manually set the names for that old forum. i know the captcha shipping with phpbb 3.x has been solved also but that's neither here nor there.

Quote from Tzyr:

Good to see you've not gone too crazy nate.

great to see you around again man. yeah, been working hard, trying to stave off the bad stuff that happens when i get bored. currently starting my own business trying to make the big bucks but we'll see. what's been keeping you busy?

man, i've got to let spambots on my shit more often if it brings back old people to catch up.

it's been so long my memory is hazy but i thought that was just the old forum exactly as it was, untouched. remember that we're on dl now.

[quote="SkippyJr"]
There are 100 additional accounts registered after the closure date.  With most of the new registrations occuring in 2009, one may guess that the spambots are getting smarter.  Were any of DJGrenola's spambot countermeasures made back then and put in place before it closed?  
[/quote]
this is exactly why i said someone probably wrote a heuristic to get the field names by their human-visibility or else (highly unlikely) they manually set the names for that old forum. i know the captcha shipping with phpbb 3.x has been solved also but that's neither here nor there.

[quote="Tzyr"]
Good to see you've not gone too crazy nate.
[/quote]
great to see you around again man. yeah, been working hard, trying to stave off the bad stuff that happens when i get bored. currently starting my own business trying to make the big bucks but we'll see. what's been keeping you busy?

man, i've got to let spambots on my shit more often if it brings back old people to catch up.

DJGrenola

2009-05-11 05:03:54 am

Yeah, I wonder how widespread this sort of hackery has become on phpBB boards. Unless we've missed something, presumably it has become widespread enough to put some effort into defeating it in a reliable way.

Even the best visual captchas do seem to be vulnerable to various forms of attack now. I would expect that Fourier analysis plus some sort of well-taught learning algorithm would defeat an awful lot of them.

Security via obscurity certainly has its uses.

nate

2009-05-11 11:44:08 am

hell, it's what's working on the sda kb right now.

but i have a few more creative ideas (yes, really) that i'd like to put into practice, and i imagine i will be getting the opportunity soon.

arkarian

2009-05-11 01:40:13 pm

red chamber dream

:)

Gamma_Metroid

2009-05-11 08:52:35 pm

I believe something needs to be fixed, as I just checked and you can still register new accounts there. I got as far as the "Just wait to be activated" screen, anyway.

arkarian

2009-05-11 11:13:34 pm

red chamber dream

right. you have to be activated now, which basically means rather than the old forum getting new spambots, i get annoyed with a bunch of emails saying they've registered and required activation. it's great !