The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Mathimagics]

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First of all, has anyone noticed that our esteemed administrator (and coder), Jason, has not been here for about a month? His last visit was 22 Jan.

Now, I see today that Denis Berthier has a birthday, and that is a surprise, a genuine member made the birthday list!

For amusement, I decided to look at the profiles of a few of our "newest members"!

"Amandamus" is from Argentina, likes to play volleyball, and apparently, likes shopping, a lot! Although perhaps not in Argentina! She cites as her website a Russian on-line shopping site catering for such things as diapers, sunglasses, handbag knockoffs, backpacks, etc. Clearly a modern woman, she has nominated the backpack category as her favorite.

"aliasmagina" from Cuba prefers to play cards, and gives his occupation as "Estate". Perhaps he hesitates to describe it as "Real Estate" for obvious reasons. His cited website (Russian again!) sells a strange looking device which turns out to be some piece of kit for DIY fuel-injector diagnostics. Apparently most of the normally-aspirated cars in Russia have died, and DIY car maintenance, which really is a genuine necessity for many Russians, now requires more sophisticated equipment. One can only sympathise ...

And finally, we have today's newest registration. This is "Platonlayef", whose profile is mostly in Russian, which I don't know much of, but I do have a passing familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet, enough to tell you that he's very interested in sex (cekc), and is from St Petersburg. There is actually one word in there beginning with a K that made me blush! Best to leave it at that ...

I ask you, what is the point of all this fake registration exercise? What advantage could one possibly gain by registering here, of all places? Does Vlad (the Impaler) Putin like Sudoku? Or is just some kid with nothing better to do than to play pranks?

[dobrichev]

If I have to write a bot that exploits some security holes in the forum software, and in order to do that, a registered user is needed, I would never care to unregister when the penetration attempt fails. Moreover I would like to keep a database of valid users for for later use on yet unknown security holes.
Most of these bots are running on hacked user machines and the machine owner has no idea what is happening on his server/PC.

A real story from 5 years ago. In my work, on a developers server machine located in server room and accessible only trough internal IP addresses in range 10.10.*.*, I ran an instance of MySql server and made user dobrichev with password dobrichev1. The only DB client that was aware of this user/pass was located on the same machine. A month later, when I googled with "dobrichev" as part of the query, I found a published MySql passwords dictionary with my password "dobrichev1" there. The guys responsible for the hardware/network/OS were really well educated, each of them had wallpaper of certificates.

[Mathimagics]

Ok, thanks, Mladen.

So it would probably be wise to root out these fake registrations, yes?

[dobrichev]

This is Admin's choice. For the last several years the forum works flawlessly. I don't know how much time administrators and moderators spend, but obviously they found some good balance for quality <-> efforts.

[blue]

I ask you, what is the point of all this fake registration exercise?

Maybe they try a 1st post with a url hook to a malware site, the moderators catch them, and they go away ?
Maybe the hooks are in thier profiles ?

[Mathimagics]

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My observations over the past 10 days suggest that these fake registrations are arriving at the rate of roughly one every hour.

I actually monitored them do over a 3-hour period, that was 10 days ago. Since then the member count is up by 270.

And that Member count is now 26,018!

I think we have a real problem!

Meanwhile, Jason remains MIA … That's starting to concern me, no forum visit in 30 days?

[rjamil]

Hi mods,

Before going to happen anything wrong with this forum, please ensure to perform contingency plan if any.

R. Jamil

[Mathimagics]

BTW, Jason has entered the building, all is well …