PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read!

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

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Here we go: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/

API doc: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/

curl -X 'GET' 
  'https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/v1/instances' 
  -H 'accept: application/json'

Will spit out suspicious instances based on fediverse.observer . You can adjust the threshold to your own preference.

sunaurus,

Nice! Would be cool if you could also include current statuses of captchas, emails, and application requirements.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Tell me how to fetch them and it will. ;)

sunaurus,

I think the easiest option is to just iterate through the list of suspicious instances, and then check {instance_url}/api/v3/site for each of them. Relevant keys of the response json are site_view.local_site.captcha_enabled, site_view.local_site.registration_mode, and site_view.local_site.require_email_verification.

Since it's a bunch of separate requests, probably it makes sense to do these in parallel and probably also to cache the results at least for a while.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

It occurs to me that this kind of thing is better left to observer, as it's set up to poll instances and gather data. I would suggest you ask them to ingest and expose this data as well

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yep, I noticed that as well: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/87761

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

Are you already defederating from suspicious instances? If not, What are you planning to do?

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I am and I've already started work on https://github.com/db0/lemmy-overseer

Admin, (edited )
@Admin@startrek.website avatar

FYI, startrek.website has purged the bot accounts and enabled CAPTCHA. Just letting you know because they were showing up on your list.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Good to hear. once fediverse observer updates your usercount, this should clear itself out. Let me know if this is not the case soon

fax_of_the_shadow,
fax_of_the_shadow avatar

@sunaurus

I'm an admin of https://sffa.community. (posting from my kbin since when I posted from my admin account it didn't show up here).

We did notice the bot influx. We had email verification on so none got past that stage. We have since turned on CAPTCHA and have purged the bots from our database.

We only opened officially a couple weeks ago so we're still working on organic content. We'd love to be federated again. Feel free to reach out if you need me to prove my admin-ship.

Admin,
@Admin@startrek.website avatar

Thanks for the heads up, StarTrek.website has enabled CAPTCHA and purged the bots from our database.

SpaceCowboy,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Starfleet takes changeling infiltrations seriously :P

Fredselfish,

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.

livejamie, (edited )

Taking a cursory look at the top 3 it looks like they're trying to remove people but I don't know if there's a way for them to do it in bulk:

It also seems like they're banning a lot of the same names/accounts, a lot of rabbitea.rs accounts seem to show up.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

First Anti-spam service ready: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

TWeaK,

Every time I see that moustache I know to pay attention!

freeskier, (edited )

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,

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,

Thank you for proactively contacting me regarding this @sunaurus. I’ve had this issue on my 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 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;.

rm_dash_r_star,
@rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee avatar

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.

Zamboniman,
@Zamboniman@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

ikiru,

I'm sure it's different per instance, but is there any discussion on what is being done with the collected emails?

I understand the need to fight bots and spam, but there are also those of us who don't want to associate emails with accounts so some privacy-related way of handling this would be appreciated.

db0,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

there's plenty of services that provide one-use emails or disposable ones

ikiru,

True, I use one myself.

That's a cool instance you're running over there, by the way! I appreciate it.

tal,
tal avatar

I suspect that there's going to need to be some analysis software that can run on the kbin and lemmy server logs looking for suspicious stuff.

Say, for instance, a ton of accounts come from one IP. That's not a guarantee that they're malicious -- like, could be some institution that NATs connections or something. But it's probably worth at least looking at, and if someone signed up 50 accounts from a single IP, that's probably at least worth red-flagging to see if they're actually acting like a normal account. Especially if the email provider is identical (i.e. they're all from one domain).

Might also want to have some kind of clearinghouse for sharing information among instance admins about abuse cases.

One other point:

I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible,

A bot is not intrinsically a bad thing. For example, I was suggesting yesterday that it would be neat if there was a bot running that posted equivalent nitter.net links in response to comments providing twitter.com links, for people who want to use those. There were a number of legitimately-helpful bots that ran on Reddit -- I personally got a kick out of the haiku bot, that mentioned to a user when their comment was a haiku -- and legitimately-helpful bots that run on IRC.

Though perhaps it would be a good idea to either adopt a convention ("bots must end in "Bot") or have some other way for bots to disclose that they are bots and provide contact information for a human, in case they malfunction and start causing problems.

But if someone is signing up hordes of them, then, yeah, that's probably not a good actor. Shouldn't need a ton of accounts for any legit reason.

d4rknusw1ld,

Sounds like a spez sponsored attack on Lemmy.

YMS,
YMS avatar

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

couragethebravedog,

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.

TWeaK,

Steve Huffman doesn't do anything, he's a greedy little pigboy who profits off of the creation of his dead "friend". He claims ownership of your ideas, for reddit's exclusive profit, at no benefit (if anything, at penalty) to yourself.

However it would be naive to assume that he hasn't directed at least some shade towards reddit. Almost as naive as to think that Google doesn't create bots to target websites that don't use their own captcha services.

PSA: When "proving you're human", always try to poison the data. They're using your input to train visual AI, without paying you for your efforts. With Google, they will typically put the training up front - there will be one or two images that a bot isn't sure about. If you give the unexpected response, the next test will be one that the machine knows, to check that you're a human who knows what they're talking about. With hcaptcha or some others, they might put the obvious one first, then check your guesses are human after.

The services will determine that you're human by other means anyway (eg mouse movements) and eventually let you through, but by giving them the wrong answer when they don't know but the right answer when they do, you can make their AI less effective.

They should be paying you for your input into their commercial enterprise, so fuck them.

xavier666,

CAPTCHA is the bare minimum. Who the hell turns it off?

sunaurus, (edited )

There is an argument to be made that captchas can be automatically bypassed with some effort.

OTOH, the current wave of bots is quite clearly favoring instances with captcha disabled, so clearly it's acting as at least a small deterrent.

Edit: Forgot to mention this earlier, but the upcoming update to Lemmy will actually remove captchas. Discussion:

  • GitHub: Remove captchas
  • GitHub: Bring back Captcha
PaintedSnail,

Sometimes, security just means not being the low-hanging fruit.

genoxidedev1,
genoxidedev1 avatar

Doing no captcha is like leaving the door open, hoping no-one breaks in, instead of at least closing the door (a closed door decreases chance of break in by near 100%, even if it's not locked)

ZILtoid1991,
ZILtoid1991 avatar

Some advanced OCR can hack the easier ones, but it's unusual.

getBoolean,

captchas block script kiddies at the very least

noodlejetski,

there's a browser addon that lets you solve Recaptcha with one click:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/

it automatically switches to the alternative accessibility option, which is based on typing in words that you hear, and uses speech recognition software to solve it. I'm fairly sure it could be automated quite easily.

etrotta,
etrotta avatar

Still way better than nothing at all

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