Apparently 761 Mb of spam in the blogging "Shout Box" crippled the MySQL database. We have emptied the table, so this shouldn't happen again... for a while.

Blame the spammers.
[Rep]

Anthony: I must confess to being something of a computer illiterate so please can you tell me how this sort of thing manages to get through your safeguards like a firewall/spam blocker etc. The BNP site has been hacked into several times as well and those seemed to be very professional and dare I say it government inspired. Are UKIP under attack in this fashion or is it a computer nerd?
[Rep]

Originally Posted by Edward Longshanks:
Anthony: I must confess to being something of a computer illiterate so please can you tell me how this sort of thing manages to get through your safeguards like a firewall/spam blocker etc. The BNP site has been hacked into several times as well and those seemed to be very professional and dare I say it government inspired. Are UKIP under attack in this fashion or is it a computer nerd?

Spambots are pieces of software which stalk out forums, register themselves and post messages.

It is very difficult for a forum to tell the difference between a spambot and a human, the spambot technology is very advanced.

Not profesional hackers by any means, just pieces of software choosing random targets.
[Rep]

Originally Posted by Edward Longshanks:
Anthony: I must confess to being something of a computer illiterate so please can you tell me how this sort of thing manages to get through your safeguards like a firewall/spam blocker etc. The BNP site has been hacked into several times as well and those seemed to be very professional and dare I say it government inspired. Are UKIP under attack in this fashion or is it a computer nerd?

The problem is a silly technical one. Spammers have auto-posting software that targets very specific areas of forums. In this case it is the "shout boxes" in the blogs. Over a period of time a very large number of spam adverts had built up in the database.
[Rep]

Can you not require that users be registered in order to post on the blogs?
[Rep]

Originally Posted by Alex McKee:
Can you not require that users be registered in order to post on the blogs?

I turned the shout boxes off completely... but it doesn't seem to make any difference :-)
[Rep]

Very odd.
[Rep]

Now that is just seriously ironic. A spambot just posted into this thread. LOL.
[Rep]

My guess is that a human creates accounts, then links a spambot to them. I've seen it before, on other forums.
[Rep]

Originally Posted by Lazyguy:
My guess is that a human creates accounts, then links a spambot to them. I've seen it before, on other forums.

Nah, it's session reuse, OCR and brute force.
[Rep]