Defeating Botmaster Spamming Bot

Dear all


Recently I've faced a very powerful software that can act like a real human.
It can spam on guestbooks, forums of various types like PhpBB, YaBB, BulletinBoard.

The url is www.botmaster.net

I knew it since a bad guy started spamming on my forum: http://forum.flashband.net

Now I have to currently disable the forum.

That bot ware is able to recognize cache image validation and check emails for "Activating account"; it can automatically create thousands of accounts and can over flow the database with the aid of multithreading features.

See its demo features:
http://www.botmaster.net/movies/XFull.htm
http://www.botmaster.net/movies/XDemo.htm

I'd like to defeat it and wanna be away from its threat.

Any ideas?

Thank you so much with Happy New Year.

iota

Happy New Year to you too.

I am not sure if this is going to be helpful...but here are a couple of ideas that I would consider.

1- Use a captcha
2- All submitted data must be approved.
3- Only allow one submission from a given IP for every 30 minutes or so.
4- use email validation for every submission by a new user.
5- Use Spam Assassin. http://spamassassin.apache.org/

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ess

One thing I have implemented that I have found to be quite effective at blocking spam (in addition to those things already mentioned) is to include an extra field somewhere in the form that must be left blank. Most of the spambots fill out all of the fields in the form with something and so would fail that test.

That sounds like a good idea there by felgall.

I shall try it out myself :)

Cheers and Happy new Year to Everyone

Ess

But the bot has also self-learning features which can defeat your suggestions.
Thanks so far.