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

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
    3·
    2 years 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.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      2·
      2 years ago

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

        • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
          3·
          2 years ago

          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@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            2·
            2 years ago

            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

  • Zamboniman@lemmy.ca
    3·
    2 years 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.

  • BigDale123@lemmy.coeus.icu
    3·
    2 years ago

    Any tips on how to get rid of all the spam accounts? I have been affected by this as well and thankfully captcha stopped them, but about 100 bots signed up before I could stop.

    Normally i’d just look through all the accounts and pick out the 4 or so users that are real. But there is no apparent way to view every user account as an admin.

    Edit: There is a relevant issue open on the lemmy-ui repo, for those interested: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/456

        • th3raid0rA
          2·
          2 years ago

          Sure, but as it stands v.0.18 WILL ship with captcha removed. (They’re already in the Release Candidate phase).

          Unless the maintainers mark this issue as a priority I recommend that we ALL stay away from that release.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      Did you figure out how to clean it up? You can see a list of users in your local_user table.

      • BigDale123@lemmy.coeus.icu
        0·
        2 years ago

        I did manage to get a list of all users without a verified email using a postgress command, but sadly no, I can not figure out how to use the PurgePerson or AdminPurgePerson endpoints that are “described” in the documentation. I ended up just writing a small python script to ban all of them for now until I can figure out how to purge them.

        It’s extra tough because user management in Lemmy is tied to posts and comments right now. Since none of the spam accounts have made posts, there’s no way in the UI to purge their accounts.

  • tal@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
    31·
    2 years 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·
        2 years 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.

  • bread@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    Maybe this is what’s implied or I’m just being silly; What is to stop a bad actor spinning up a Lemmy instance, creating a bunch of bot accounts with no restrictions, and spamming other instances? Would the only route of action be for the non spam instances to individually defederate the spam ones? Seems like that would be a bit of a cat and mouse situation. I’m not too familiar with the inner workings and tools that Lemmy has that would be useful in this situation

    • PriorProject@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 years ago

      They can do this, and it is cat and mouse. But…

      1. It generally costs money to stand up an instance. It often requires a credit-card, which reduces anonymity. This will dissuade many folks.
      2. A malicious instance can be defederated, so it might not be all that useful.
      3. People can contact the security team at the host providing infra/internet to the spammer. Reputable hosts will kill the account of a spammer, which again is harder to duplicate if the host requires payment and identity info.
      4. Malicious hosts that fail to address repeated abuse reports can be ip-blocked.
      5. Eventually Lemmy features can be built to protect against this kind of thing by delaying federation, requiring admin approval, or shadow -banning them during a trial period.

      Email has shown us that there’s a playbook that kind of works here, but it’s not easy or pleasant.

      • katie@lemmy.tillicumnet.com
        1·
        2 years ago

        I’ve been thinking about this as well. As a user of a private instance, I would be absolutely fine with a “federation application” much like user registration is currently.

  • Somoon@lemmy.sumuun.net
    2·
    2 years 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·
      2 years ago

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

  • fax@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    had to create an account to post since my comments from sffa.community and kbin.social weren’t showing up.

    I’m an admin over at sffa.community. We did notice the bot wave. They never got past email verification. We hve since implemented CAPTCHA and have purged the bots from our database.

    You can see we are down to organic users. We’ve only been officially open for a couple weeks so we’re still working on content but we are safe to federate with again, if you’d like.

  • badbrainstorm@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m noobish, but could they be defederated until they get their act together before they spam everybody?