Stop account sign up spam from using real email addresses? - heroku

I run a website where you must create an account and verify via email to access many site features. Lately a bunch of the sent account confirmation emails are being marked as spam because someone or something is using real email addresses to sign up for fake accounts on my site. I know they are fake because almost all of the time the IPs are coming from Russia or have garbled usernames like 'VDLWYvAkZniTQS' and have no site activity. It's always a different IP though so just banning one at a time wouldn't help. They also sign up about 3 accounts/hr so rate limiting wouldn't really work. I'm starting to run out of ideas and my email service provider might deactivate my account because of the uptick in spam complaints. Any ideas on how to combat this?
I've tried installing both a honeypot and reCAPTCHA v2 into the sign up form but they haven't helped too much. If anything they started to use more convincing usernames now but the IPs are clearly still coming from Russia.

Related

Instagram user's contact e-mail?

Ruby on rails dev here.
This question has been asked before. Here, here and here.
The problem is that they did not make the right question or the solution given was somewhat shallow.
I ´ll be as specific as I can.
The Goal
I want get the user´s contact e-mail and not the account e-mail. Two different things. :)
Some users leave their email on the contact button. It´s public.
My goal is to make a software that can extract e-mails, but for now, only extracting one e-mail from one single account will be more than enough to have my MVP going.
here is an example below on how instagram let users share their e-mail.
The Problem
It only shows in app :( If it were to be shown on the browser as well, it would be a walk in the park. The contact button that has the e-mail and phone number does not show in the browser.
**The Good Part*
There is some solutions to it.
This guy has a figured it out using the API, but I don´t quite understand how he did it. The downside is that all solution wants to sell you a product.
The focus of this company lies on extracting instagram e-mails and it seems legit.
Last but not least, this dude is using appium to extract those juicy e-mails. The third won´t really work for me because it seems too messy. Having to use a android emulator will be my last resort.
Thanks for helping and happy new year.
Set up mitmproxy on your machine.
Set up the certificates on your phone and use your machine as the gateway.
Analyze the traffic.
Reverse engineer the API (to log in and get info about user profiles) and then use it in your Ruby/Python/whatever code.

"Request for access" messages coming from my Google Docs add-on users

I developed a Google Docs add-on that is now fairly popular (300k installed users, https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/onelook_thesaurus/372652075936). Since Sept 30, 2019, I have been receiving sharing requests for the Apps Script source code of this add-on, directly from the email addresses of end users. I have received a few dozen of these over the last month to my developer email address.
I'm not sure what triggers the sharing request, but I don't think these end users are developers, or even aware of the Apps Script code. I believe the sharing requests are being created programmatically by the Google Docs backend, possibly due to some error condition, but I am at a loss trying to replicate the problem or identify the source of it.
This is problematic since these users do not intend to share their email addresses with me.

reCaptcha - "send alerts to owners" - who?

I'm trying to get reCaptcha working on my website.
I found out I have to register my domain for this first, since I already have a google account this is quite easy, but the very last checkbox made me think:
How does google determine who the owners are?
And what kind of alerts will those be? E-Mails?
I'm a bit worried that some random person will get an E-Mail one day not knowing what to do with it since I'm not the only one working on that domain. And if they just mean my google account I'm registering this with...that doesn't make sense because they should've written "you" instead of owners then. - although your site is making this even more confusing. :D
I'm aware this is not directly a programming question.
I'm open for suggestions for a better Stack-exchange platform to ask this question at, there are too many - I couldn't find any other that seem to fit.
In the reCAPTCHA admin settings, there is a textbox where you can enter a list of email addresses for owners. This will grant them access to manage the reCAPTCHA settings and send them alerts, if enabled.

joomla 3 email to web interface solution - logging in, sending and receiving emails only through my joomla! 3 website

I'm developing a website and I was wondering if its fairly easy to set up an email interface with in my joomla! 3 website. An email system with inbox, outbox, possibly junk mail.. etc. I need basic tasks of an email system like Gmail or Yahoo, where the already logged in user at my website can send and receive emails with attachments only through my joomla website. Meaning the user can not use outlook or any kind of email application to send or receive emails. If the user needs to email someone with the email that we gave him after we registered him/her at our website, he needs to log in first to our website in order to have access to the email service.
I'm wondering if this kind of idea is easily achievable in joomla 3 as I'm kind of new to Joomla developing- only started a month ago. Or if it's too complicated and it costs a lot of over head. If it is possible how can I achieve it because I have researched the internet for 3 days with out any luck for a specific joomla 3 extension.
However I found other ideas like roundcube and squirrelmail but for sure I need something way simpler than that since the email service is already provided by my host. I just need an interface, thats all. Also I found this link that talks about something called DMail but also its too advanced and possibly a very old post too.
So please if any one could help. Thanks!

Creative account confirmation without the use of emails

I employ email validation to grant people full use of the site. The trouble is, sometimes these emails get spam-boxed, or never arrive, so I get many people complaining that they cannot confirm their account.
Was wondering if there are other (creative) ways to offer secondary validation option to users who didnt get the validation. Its a free site, so I dont want to ask for credit cards, or mobile #s.
The purpose of this is to make abuse of the site less rampant, since we ban a lot of people, and they come back with dozens of accounts to prove something. Spam/robot registrations are not an issue (right now).
What we started doing recently was letting members send us an email to a special email address. We give them a hash code, and all they have to do is put that code somewhere in the subject or the body of the email, and send it to us. We have a cron job running in the background that gets those emails, parses the subject/body looking for the hash, and if found activates the account.
It doesn't work 100%, because some ISPs also block their users from sending us emails, but no solution would work 100%.
Based on your comment in Rob S.' answer, it sounds more like you want to identify situations where the same browser is creating multiple accounts rather than confirm that what's at the other end is human.
Dropping a cookie in the user's browser can be very helpful in finding the repeat offenders, especially those not savvy enough to clear their cookies or visit while in private mode. Some forum software like vBulletin does this and can notify the administrators when it happens.
Another alternative might be browser fingerprinting, which is where you use a bunch of the information provided in the HTTP exchange. An example of this is the EFF's Panopticlick.
Just got a "fun" new way to annoy your banned people a bit.
once you ban them (I guess you close the account and ban the IP). Then log their browser agent string with their IP and screen resolution.
If there is a match when showing the website to them. Just remove the registration link/page. Dont even show the link to the page, as it might piss them off. Dont explain why its gone. Just keep it gone, eg. for 3 weeks or 2 month.
That way they dont have a cookie on the browser to remove, they cant find the registration so they cant know WHY they cant make a new account.
Secondly, if on a school or something (dont know how old they are), the other existing users will still be able to login to their accounts as its ONLY registration that has been removed. Not login.
How about that? is that clever enough?
Basically what you're looking to do is separate the humans from the robots. There are two primary ways to do this:
1) Require users signing up to check boxes and type a word spelled out in an image captcha. These are usually very difficult tasks for a computer to complete.
2) Allow users to sign-up using their account from a different site such as OpenID or Google assuming that anyone who has one of these accounts is a real person.
I recommend combining both methodologies.
Good luck!
There are unlimited ways of doing this.
You mention mobiles and free, but if you have access to a SMS-gateway, you can receive SMS-messages for free (but might need to pay some sort of monthly subscription though). But show a dynamically generated code the the current user. Store this code in "his session" and do an ajax check each 15-30 sec to see if the sms-code was received by the gateway. If so, accept the account and let them registrate. This would requiere the gateway + your users to have a personal mobile. Enough about mobiles...
Make a question or more that is randomly generated. Use pictures/tokens instad of tekst so that the user has to press the correct image in correct order to perform some sort of answer.
Could be like a jackpot-machine with 3 cells where the images are randomly placed and generated inside dynamic named files, so that robots cant analyse the names to guess the right answer.
You mention e-mails to be easy to spoof. Yes indeed, but what if the emails would come lets say each week containing some sort of "important info" that the user would need to read/use on the website to continue. Once the account hasnt been used for a certain time (lets say 3 month, kill it)... and you could also say to have a "free account" you must accept that we send you 1 mail pr. month that you need to activate within 1 week. If you dont, we are free to close/delete your account details.
... and many more
I dont know what you want to "protect", but if its for gaming, then dont let the gamers have "extra levels/weapons" until they have provided a certain amount of these codes OR paid for access OR validated by phone or something.
Thats my first 3 ideas, I think the possibilities are unlimited. The main issue here is, make it too hard to validate yourself and the users go away unless your site is REALLY worth it.
You might think of the much used "Free forever (but limited)" approach way of selling stuff these days on the net. The users can make as many accounts they want, but the licens is still only "single/small/basic". Once you get more experienced, you get more features or you might just upgrade by paying... at this time you know WHO is real and WHO isnt.
My point is, dont over protect. Just design with the mind of spammers will always find a way in, no matter how good you protect it. Those giving up first are your real users/customers.
I would rather spend time on making this product/website/game so great that EVERYONE wants to pay for an account after a while.
Lastly from real life... there are COMPANIES in China with kids employeed to play World of Warcraft with one purpose. Harvest virtual gold and sell it on Ebay to other western players who pays with real dollars. Its not allowed according to the gamelicens and their accounts/gameslicenses are constantly getting banned. But it gives them so much income so they have calculated with this and they just buy new licences and continue.
So if EVEN Blizard(WoW creators)
doesnt have enough power/money to keep
fakes out of the game, how do you
expect to do much better? :o)
Usefull answer?

Resources