Lemmy apparently hit with another bot wave tonight (+ 623686 overall users) (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by genoxidedev1@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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I looked at the lemmy stats again today like the last few days (since the 1st of July), apparently tonight there has been another wave of bot signups.:

Lemmy: 1,555,395 overall users (+ 2363)
Kbin: 55,201 overall users (+ 433)

Active last 30 days:
Lemmy: 56,859 users (+ 1142)
Kbin: 55,099 users (+ 331)

^ 2023-07-02 20:15:00 CEST

Lemmy: 2,179,081 overall users (+ 623686, bots)
Kbin: 55,863 (+ 764)

Active last 30 days:
Lemmy: 59,438 (+ 2579)
Kbin: 55,532 (+ 433)

^ 2023-07-03 13:30:00 CEST

Of course "tonight" refers to tonight in central european summer time so it probably was more middle-of-the-day for you.

If you go to the site I linked at the beginning and sort by "Total users" you can see instances with 80000 users and 1 active user for example.

Open signups should be prohibited and affected instances should do something against the botted accounts or defederate. New instances should at the very least start using captchas and email verification.

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[-] Talaraine@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

How have they not even enabled Captcha at this point? There's been warnings and charts pasted all over the place?

[+] dedale@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

[deleted]

[-] okawari@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

I host a bunch of websites for normal small businesses many of them have contact forms and all of them have captcha.
We've seen a steady rise in spam that gets through it over the last year or so. I don't have any concrete numbers at hand, but we've heard from customers that they used to get a few spam replies once in a while before but get 10-20 a day over prolonged periods of time now.

I wouldn't be surprised if we're aproaching a point where computers are better at solving captchas than human.

[-] phosphorik@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

Traditional captchas have been easier for computers than humans for a while. I imagine these “pick all matching” captchas aren’t far behind.

[-] genoxidedev1@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

The main reason to do captchas nowadays is to keep the door closed. Of course they do not deter more expert-ish people, but opportunity "hackers" aka script kiddies. If you're not using captchas you're just inviting them to run a script on your site. Big sites use captchas, there's no reason for the fediverse to not use captchas. We don't need to be "special" in regards to security.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023

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