XF 1.4 Thousands of spam conversations

[grantus]

I was notified by some of my members that they were receiving spam conversations from one user. I checked and that one user sent over 28,000 conversations! All the same message.

How is that even possible? I can't imagine someone sending those out one by one.

Has anyone else encountered this? Is it possible there's some script involved?

 

[Mike]

That would almost certainly be a script. Using the flood check can help with this, as at the least that would've caused 30 seconds (or your flood check timer) delay between each message, so it would have taken nearly 10 days to send that many conversations.

You can delete all the conversations started by this user in the ACP or via the spam cleaner, though with this many conversations, it may be difficult (they're not designed to handle this amount of content). The ACP cleaner should delete some even if there's a timeout, which means that if you get an error and refresh, it should continue; you can keep doing this until it's resolved.

 

[grantus]

I managed to clean it up with the spam cleaner and there weren't any timeouts. It didn't take long at all actually.

But for a script - is that a security issue? I mean, is that something that is run from a file on my site? Or some other way?

 

[Mike]

No, it's something run remotely and just makes the same requests as any other browser. Realistically, you could try to look at your logs to ban the IP, but it'd be trivial for them to make the requests through another one.

 

[grantus]

Ok I'll check the logs and keep an eye on it. Thanks.

 

[AndyB]

I suggest the following add-on:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/new-content-limit.5078/

 

[grantus]

I suggest the following add-on:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/new-content-limit.5078/

Thanks, I'll check that out.