All users Please Read ********Update 30 March

[Bufferstop]

We are currently receiving around 50 attempts per day to register from suspect sources. They are all being deleted.
It looks as though this situation is not going away anytime soon. As far as I can tell the source is Russia or some of their few remaining friends. In the meantime:-
Existing users - PM me if you are about to change something in your profile, eg Name, Password, Preferences etc. and include your current email address. It means I've far less chance of accidentally deleting you.

New users, Don't try to sign up from a multi user computer (College or school PC's being the worst). Use a name based on your real name, a railway themed nickname, or your email address. This will help spot you among the multitude of rogue requests. If you use your email address, please Private Message me as soon as your account is active with a preferred name or nickname, and wait to send your first post until we have removed your email, we don't want to broadcast it to Vlad and his mates.
There's a bit of a war going on, on the WWW, so be careful out there!

John W (aka Bufferstop)

[Peterm]

Thanks, John. I wonder what makes these people tick.

[Bufferstop]

They don't seem to take much notice after setting off their bot. I can bulk delete them as they appear in a list of inactive users, I mark the lot then unmark any that look like real names, then delete all, less than a minute. I should copy all the names to a list then disallow each of those names, that would take too much useful time. If I still had my contacts at the local college I would be tempted to pass their IP addresses to the bunch of hackers who didn't realise we knew exactly what they were up to, they could practise their DDS attacks on them.

[SRman]

They don't seem to take much notice after setting off their bot. I can bulk delete them as they appear in a list of inactive users, I mark the lot then unmark any that look like real names, then delete all, less than a minute. I should copy all the names to a list then disallow each of those names, that would take too much useful time. If I still had my contacts at the local college I would be tempted to pass their IP addresses to the bunch of hackers who didn't realise we knew exactly what they were up to, they could practise their DDS attacks on them.

I like that last idea. I like it a lot!

[SRman]

Sorry - accidental double-post.

[Roger (RJ)]

Have you tried changing the security question? They seem to pass the answer around their friends.

[Bufferstop]

The security question is pretty ineffective as it can't cope with variations on the answer. An AI filter would be better but that's not an available option yet.

[Jaz]

Thanks for the heads up, sympathise w it’s your clean up exercise I had a faceache railway modelling group, I handed over to a fellow modeller I got fed up removing very iffy pictures and **** offers, as you say keeping them out is like stopping a dripping tap with the occasional gush, I once had to manually remove over a hundred disgusting photographs, fav=ce ache was useless.

Thank you so much for your continued efforts, they are much appreciated

[Bufferstop]

Bump

[Flashbang]

We had loads of 'Russian' attacks on my forum and the security question was changed to one that can only have one answer. It stopped them dead and so far after a month of no attacks it remains so. Once the question is breached the word is spread so its important to change it regularly.
Also if attacks are very strong then using Captcha along with a single answer question helps stop robot spammers.