Bots, Spammers, and Hackers...

[Justin B.]

... are back to work!

I noticed over the past several days the volume of errors (hack attempts, back-door registration attempts, etc.) in the forum error log was way down.  I was hoping against hope this might be a trend but this morning I was met with almost 200 errors since last night!

I've came to the conclusion that the majority of this stuff is perpetrated by trojans and worms on peoples workplace computers.  I am thinking that a lot of these were shut down over the past several days so the bots were "sleeping," so to speak.

[wilcom]

I have noticed lately that there seems to be an elevated Visitor number while the bots are consistent. I just checked and NO bots, but 35 visitors..... that's not the ratio I have observed in the past.

[Bob_Roller]

In admin mode, you can see the IP addresses,
most of the ' guests ' on this site most of them are only a few numbers apart .

A few weeks ago, all of the ' guests' , showed an origin in France .

I'm sure proxy servers are involved here .

[Burt]

It has been the case for a little while now that when I log in, I am redirected and log in again.  The password save recognises the prompts both times and then I am "in". 

My user name and password are specific to this site only and no others.  The only problem I have had is I am unable to post photos. 

However the connection does come up as "not secure".  Would this be something to be concerned about? 

[Justin B.]

I don't think it is a big problem for a general discussion forum.  All that means is that data sent back and forth is not encrypted.  Now, if this was an e-commerce site that would be suicide!

I have no idea why you can't post a photo unless it's too big or has an extension that's not on the "approved" filetype list.