We're popular today

[Bob Schroeck]

Twenty-six guests just now.  And about half of them are reading the "3D Modeling" thread. Rob, you been pointing folks from your wiki at us?

[robkelk]

I haven't pointed anybody here, but I have pointed folks at All The Tropes... Maybe there's a cross-connection.

[Labster]

Or maybe it's just one user wardriving while reading that thread.

[Bob Schroeck]

As I type this, we have 30 "Guests" reading the boards, trying to register, or looking at "no permissions" pages. I used to get worried about this, but you know, the systems I have in place seem to do a damn fine job of keeping the spammers out. I've only had to manually reject a spammer's registration once in the past six months.

[Bob Schroeck]

29 "guests" right now; we've actually been running with no less than 10 or 15 almost every time I've been on the board in the last five days or so. You gotta wonder, did the retry cycles for all those spammers just line up, or did we attract attention because we've been reasonably well-protected and they want in?

[Bob Schroeck]

We must be on someone's "crack this" list somewhere.  It's been the best part of a week since I saw less than 15 "guests" trying to get access at any given time, and it's generally been up in the 20s.

[classicdrogn]

I'd wonder why they'd bother, for a relatively small forum like this, but "because it's there" and apparently "not because it is easy, but because it is hard" are probably reason enough. I guess it doesn't hurt if they're having fun, as long as it's not running up your data costs too much? Though making sure the backups run regularly is probably a good idea, even more so than usual.

[robkelk]

I suspect classicdrogn has the gist of it - they're trying to get in for the boasting rights.

[Bob Schroeck]

Of course, since I have to manually approve anyone who gets past the automated registration, it's still not going to get them into the board unless they can really fake me out. And I have a very simple question that J. Random Hacker must answer to get approved, and almost certainly has no answer to (and certainly hasn't in the past).

I should note that my intrusion countermeasures are also geared to repelling spammers, whose "registrants" may well be automated anyway.

[Bob Schroeck]

And we're still averaging more than 20 "guests" any time I check the board. Yay.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh yeah, and it's just not letting up. The Register posted an article yesterday about how the botnets and other bad actors seem, in the last six months or so, to have shifted gears from subtle attacks to simply trying to batter their way into their target systems; I guess we just came up on the target list.

[robkelk]

How to get onto the target list:
* show up in a Google search result; and
* don't already have a copy of the botnet's ad of the day posted.

[Bob Schroeck]

Still going, with nothing less than 20 in the last few days, and usually higher.

Also, I ducked into the Admin control panel and checked out the status displays for the various antispammer systems. Shields are holding nicely, Captain. On one I had 18 pages of log -- I deleted everything from before the last 30 days... and was left with 14 pages of log.

[Bob Schroeck]

Still averaging over 20 "guests" every time I look. (Sooner or later I'm going to stop reporting on the new normal.) I guess I should be glad that I put such an idiosyncratic selection of security questions into the board -- it seems to be the only thing keeping me from having to deal with a flood of applications.