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:
- Close sign-ups entirely
- Only allow sign-ups with applications
- 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.
Thank you for proactively contacting me regarding this @sunaurus@lemm.ee. 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 @sunaurus@lemm.ee 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;
.