this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read! (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sunaurus@lemm.ee to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] sunaurus@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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:

[–] PaintedSnail@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] genoxidedev1@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] getBoolean@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

captchas block script kiddies at the very least

[–] noodlejetski@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Still way better than nothing at all