On 23 March 2015 at 08:42, Joe Brockmeier jzb@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
For whatever reason, we're seeing a fair number of complaints that people are being spammed by subscription requests. It looks like there's some sort of script hitting a number of mailman installations and sending subscribe requests for a variety of email addresses.
I have no idea what this accomplishes for the person(s) behind the bot(s) but it's annoying people and AFAIK we don't have a good way of blocking it.
We could cut this off at the pass by turning off the ability to subscribe, but that means we'd have to process subscription requests manually and some folks might not subscribe if they have to jump through additional hoops. But I don't think the subscription rate is particularly high for this list - so that may be a minor issue.
Thoughts? I hate to make things more complicated, but I also would like our list software not be abused.
So it looks like someone has decided to use a botnet to subscribe 4000+ addresses to marketing over and over again. The ips are all over the world so it is not going to be easy to block so I am guessing it will be best to turn off subscribe until we can find a better solution. This might be multiple ones as someone seems to be doing every person in @qq.com and another set is doing other email sites.