this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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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! (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/177673

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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This happened to me, although luckily I managed to turn off registration after about 80 signups. I did have email verification enabled but noticed that every single email address was fake/the email bounced, so they havent been able to verify the accounts and post.

I have now enabled applications (along with email verification) - does anyone have any opinion on using captcha instead of applications? I feel like captcha has already been defeated by bots.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fwiw the captcha support in lemmy is probably going away soon. It needs to be reimplemented into another database table (or something like that) anyway. Given that it is too hard for many humans, too easy for many bots, and devs are slammed with work, makes more sense to delete as a first step

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't have the time right now but someone should double check if captcha rework is in the GitHub issues as well so that they not only remove it but keep track of redoing it later as well...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Captcha is seemingly what is protecting this instance. Although it is bypassable in theory, it's working for us right now.

As the other commenters mentioned they are planning to remove Captcha in the next update but also other people have created an issue on GitHub to keep Captcha.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Bypassing captcha is technically possible but very hard, hard enough that it doesn't make sense financially to do it. Keeping it is a must. If they do end up removing it, we need to add it back in (actually not that hard to do)