PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read!

This should be probably pinned.

Here we go: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/

API doc: https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/

 undefined

    
curl -X 'GET' \
  'https://overseer.dbzer0.com/api/v1/instances' \
  -H 'accept: application/json'

  

Will spit out suspicious instances based on fediverse.observer . You can adjust the threshold to your own preference.

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.

CAPTCHA is the bare minimum. Who the hell turns it off?

99% of fedi instances should require sign-ups with applications and email. It does not make sense to let in users indiscriminately unless you have a 24h staff in charge of moderation.

Yep, I noticed that as well: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/87761

Thanks for the heads up, StarTrek.website has enabled CAPTCHA and purged the bots from our database.

First Anti-spam service ready: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Sounds like a spez sponsored attack on Lemmy.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Every time I see that moustache I know to pay attention!

I'm sure it's different per instance, but is there any discussion on what is being done with the collected emails?

I understand the need to fight bots and spam, but there are also those of us who don't want to associate emails with accounts so some privacy-related way of handling this would be appreciated.

One thing I like about lemmy was having to put in an application and waiting for approval. I knew I was vetted and others here were too.

Figure that alone could keep out most of the trolls and definitely the bots.

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.

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.

Looks like my instance got hit with a bot. I had email verification enabled but had missed turning on captcha (captcha enable should be up with enabling email verification settings). The bot used fake emails so none of the accounts are verified, but still goes towards account numbers. Is there really any good way to clean this up? Need a way to purge unverified accounts or something.