Early S Forum Infiltration????

I just checked my profile randomly and saw this:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KPiFU1Bw0.../Early%2BS.jpg
NOT ONE OF THESE MEMBER NAMES HAS EVER POSTED ANYTHING

This doesn't give me a very warm fuzzy feeling . . .

It's constant and it affects everyone on this site. SSL certificates and HTTPS protocol upgrades have been suggested to no avail... and remember, we don't have a vote on such matters.

Recent Visitors

The last 10 visitor(s) to this page were:
aherrmanngreg, auggjacket, cizchas, dzzadevi, iotrawickreyn, lsissellbren, niernola, oewandoskmanu, wawwesp, ydwayroyt

This page has had 2,133 visits

Busy bots at work. But for what?

This is my thread starting in Feb 2019, and nothing has changed, so yes, we are under attack.
http://www.early911sregistry.org/for...range-activity

I also had 10 oddball visitors?

Almost everyone will have the ten oddballs, and if you check tomorrow, probably ten new oddballs. Back in Feb I identified over 200 oddballs; weird names and no posts, but found on many profile pages. So these oddballs check out our profiles looking for info on us that is useful such as email addresses, phone #'s and street addresses. We are being targetted, no doubt about it.

This type of thing is not unique to this forum. It happens on any internet forum where member accounts can be created without human approval.

These guys are mining profiles for easily compromised passwords or modern day chatter boxes oversharing personal data in their profiles.

As long as you have an extremely strong password on your account (to thwart account takeover for fake for sale listings) and don't go on about yourself in your profile (full name, address, contact details, favorite chia pet, etc), you are probably fine.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bullethead

It's constant and it affects everyone on this site. SSL certificates and HTTPS protocol upgrades have been suggested to no avail... and remember, we don't have a vote on such matters.

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Exactly. But I'm on this. More to come very soon.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arne

This type of thing is not unique to this forum. It happens on any internet forum where member accounts can be created without human approval.

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That's an overly broad and untrue statement. I personally own forums that avoid these problems without human involvement and there are numerous things we could be doing to better protect our members (or, as Chuck would say, users).

Full disclosure: as an Internet professional, I don't lay awake at nights worrying about it only because of the limited personal data involved. That doesn't excuse the inferiority of nearly every aspect of these forums.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LiveFromNY

That's an overly broad and untrue statement. I personally own forums that avoid these problems without human involvement and there are numerous things we could be doing to better protect our members (or, as Chuck would say, users).

Full disclosure: as an Internet professional, I don't lay awake at nights worrying about it only because of the limited personal data involved. That doesn't excuse the inferior quality of nearly every aspect of these forums.

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I agree, really. My IT experience (before I retired) was building, securing and maintaining the servers and OS. So I dealt with physical and network security for the most part, not application security.

As you noted, there really isn't much at stake here, but it does indicate that improvement is possible.