[Haifux] Reporting forum spammers per IP

[Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Eli Billauer <eli at billauer.co.il> wrote:

> **
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm running a little phpBB forum, which is being bomarded by attempts to
> submit spam posts. I've solved the core problem already (i.e. preventing
> the spamming itself and the flood of new users) down to zero, but I've
> noticed a huge amount of attempts -- I'm at ~800,000 hits per month, and
> it's not getting any better.
>
> It's quite easy to tell a spammer's IP watching the HTTP logs, so it's not
> a big deal to write a simple script and find the offending IPs, and block
> the worst of them individually. In fact, I've already done that.
>
> But now I want revenge: I'd like to make the spammers' hosting providers
> aware of their user activity. Is there any convention on how to
> automatically track down who should be contacted for each and every IP? Or
> maybe some database, where hosting providers are really looking?
>
> I expect some dozens of these every month. So an automated reporting
> method should be possible.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>    Eli
>
>  --
> Web: http://www.billauer.co.il
>
>
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>
As a wikipedia controller I used to do exactly that, but I had to do this
manually. I would track each IP and find its owner by a combination of
host, whois and traceroute. Then I would check out the owner, and decide
(on a hunch, mostly) if this was a private machine connected by an ISP or a
bad company’s machine. In the first case I would report the machine to the
abuse address of the ISP, and in the second - to the police in that country
(this was usually done by people who had more time than me - I just
supplied them with the evidence).

Sadly, I do not remember any effect that these operations ever had.

-- 
Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda.
http://ladypine.org
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