New Registrations Temporarily Disabled - Spam

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Maigrets
Admin
Posts: 1557
Joined: October 2nd, 2008
Gender: Female
Born in: 1954
Location: Australia
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Just letting everyone know that new registrations have been disabled temporarily due to a large influx of spam registrations and of course posts.

When the forum anti-spam countermeasures have been updated it will be opened again.

Apologies to the genuine folk who wish to register, but this should only be a short lived inconvenience.

Thank You,
Maigrets.
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it sayingEnd Of The World Switch PLEASE DO NOT TOUCHthe paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Terry Pratchett
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Maigrets
Admin
Posts: 1557
Joined: October 2nd, 2008
Gender: Female
Born in: 1954
Location: Australia
Contact:

ALL and I mean ALL new registrations from the 14 and 15th December 2014 have been Deactivated and IP Banned as well as their posts removed where applicable. This includes one that fooled me from last week.

Except where it's very obvious I tend to err on the side of caution since I don't want to push a genuine person out the door, so if any of these registrations was in fact genuine, I apologize.

I can look up IP addresses and there was a recurring theme over these two days. The majority came from one country in particular and a few from another.
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it sayingEnd Of The World Switch PLEASE DO NOT TOUCHthe paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Terry Pratchett
User avatar
Maigrets
Admin
Posts: 1557
Joined: October 2nd, 2008
Gender: Female
Born in: 1954
Location: Australia
Contact:

I sent two messages to Alex when I disabled registrations and until I get a reply new registrations will stay disabled. The forum doesn't seem to be notifying recipients of PM's now even when the option is selected in your profile Prefs, so I can't say when he will check in and see them.


On the 14th December the phpBB forum hosts were hacked and the database compromised. This was accomplished by a member's login details being compromised. They are working to get services back online. Due to this, and the fact I am caretaking this forum and not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I can't access the Knowledge Base to look things up. This particularly affects how to update the Anti-spam security.

See here for details.
http://www.phpbb.com/kb/

You may wish to change your password for this forum, especially if you use the same password at other sites and forums. However, I think this mainly refers to the host sites as mentioned below.
From the above link:
The attackers were able to obtain access to the phpBB.com and area51 databases, meaning that user information, including hashed salted passwords, was compromised. Additionally, all logins on area51 between Dec. 12th and Dec. 15th were logged in plaintext. While the hashing algorithm utilized in phpBB will make it difficult to obtain those passwords, you should not take any chances. If you were using your phpBB.com or area51 passwords anywhere else, you must change them.
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it sayingEnd Of The World Switch PLEASE DO NOT TOUCHthe paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Terry Pratchett
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