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:
- Close sign-ups entirely
- Only allow sign-ups with applications
- 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.
Yeah, I caught (at the same time as lemmy.nz) the bit signups in time. I only had about 20 and @Dave@lemmy.nz had about 100. We both have captcha enabled now.
Interestingly none of the 20 I had had email address but username of <word>nnn where lemmy.nz all had obvious spam email address.