Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

  • Open sign-ups
  • No captcha
  • No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

  1. Close sign-ups entirely
  2. Only allow sign-ups with applications
  3. Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

Update: on lemm.ee, I have defederated the most suspicious spambot-infested instances.

To clarify: this means small instances with an unnaturally fast explosion in user counts over the past day and very little organic activity. I plan to federate again if any of these instances get cleaned up. I have heard that other instances are planning (or already doing) this as well.

It’s not a decision I took lightly, but I think protecting users from spam is a very important task for admins. Full info here: https://lemm.ee/post/197715

If you’re an admin of an instance that’s defederated from lemm.ee but wish to DM me, you can find me on Matrix: @sunaurus:matrix.org

    • couragethebravedog@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      I highly doubt spez did this. Reddit is currently doing fine. Even if it all goes away he’s sitting on over a decade of genuine human conversations he can sell to AI companies and make millions. He isn’t worried.

    • YMS@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Or just the unavoidable spam bot accounts coming as long as it’s easy and the instance operators being still unprepared.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    41·
    1 year ago

    This might be related but I’ve noticed that someone is [likely automatically] following my posts and downvoting them. Kind of funny in a 'verse without karma.

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think it’s the case here, as I’ve noticed this after posts in small communities:

        • c/linguistics (~240 members)
        • c/parana (1 member - new comm)

        I think that the person/bot/whatever is following specific people.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    I know from talking to admins when pbpBB was really popular that fighting spammers and unsavory bots was the big workload in running a forum. I’d expect the same for Fediverse instances. I hope a system can be worked out to make it manageable.

    As a user I don’t have a big problem with mechanisms like applications for the sake of spam control. It’s hugely more convenient when an account can be created instantaneously, but I understand the need.

    I do wonder how the fediverse is going to deal with self-hosting bad actors. I would think some kind of vetting process for federation would need to exist. I suppose you could rely on each admin to deal with that locally, but that does not sound like an efficient or particularly effective solution.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
    31·
    1 year ago

    99% of fedi instances should require sign-ups with applications and email. It does not make sense to let in users indiscriminately unless you have a 24h staff in charge of moderation.

    • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      Email verification + captcha should be enough. The application part is cringe and a bad idea, unless you really want to be your own small high school clique and don’t have any growth ambitions, which is perfectly fine but again should not be expected from general instances looking to welcome Redditors.

  • freeskier@centennialstate.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Looks like my instance got hit with a bot. I had email verification enabled but had missed turning on captcha (captcha enable should be up with enabling email verification settings). The bot used fake emails so none of the accounts are verified, but still goes towards account numbers. Is there really any good way to clean this up? Need a way to purge unverified accounts or something.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      How comfortable are you with SQL? You can see all unused verifications in the email_verification table. You should be able to just delete those users from local_user, and then update your user count with the new count of the local_user table in site_aggregates.user (where site_id = 1)

      • voldern@lemmy.ml
        4·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for proactively contacting me regarding this @[email protected]. I’ve had this issue on my https://feddi.no instance, but I have added a captcha and registration applications now. Hopefully it will alleviate some of the problem.

        All of the bots accounts seems to have a number in their email so I manually looked through the list of users in email_verification that contained numbers in the email to look for false positives:

        select * from email_verification where email ~ '[0-9]+';

        before running

        delete from local_user where id in (select local_user_id from email_verification);

        to delete the users.

        By suggestion from @[email protected] I updated site_aggregates to reflect the new users count on the instance:

        UPDATE site_aggregates SET users = (SELECT count(*) FROM local_user) WHERE site_id = 1;.

  • Somoon@lemmy.sumuun.net
    2·
    1 year ago

    It was brought to my attention that my instance was hit with the spam bots regs. I’ve disabled registration and deleted the accounts from the DB. is there anything else I can do to clear the user stats on the sidebar? EDIT: I have reversed the stats too.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      You can do this by updating site_aggregates.users in your database (WHERE site_id = 1)

  • Zamboniman@lemmy.ca
    2·
    1 year ago

    Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

    Yup, I noticed this as well.

    Hopefully the mods of the instances will notice this and remove these accounts quickly! Despite this, I think the mods of all instances, and of all communities, had better brace themselves for incoming spam and hate speech.

  • Fredselfish @lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    One thing I like about lemmy was having to put in an application and waiting for approval. I knew I was vetted and others here were too.

    Figure that alone could keep out most of the trolls and definitely the bots.