To all Fedi Admins Currently Being hit with a Spam Wave:

This kind of spam is now over! Unmute all the instances no longer on my list!

I've just released v4.0.0 of The UNmute List! I'd be very happy about a small donation because I have very little time and I cannot really justify working on this list with my current schedule ​

There is a new type of spam, the same instances are affected as before. Those responsible in Japan are said to have been arrested.

Without further ado...

Limit these instances:

[Full List of Affected Instances Here]

Just get the list to download and import here.

Simply import this list and you'll mute the 47 worst spam instances currently known to me! I've worked on it for multiple weeks, sometimes ~9 hours at a time verifying all lists sent to me manually.

Limit first, defederate only in worst situations!

Consider re-federating with and un-silencing any of the mentioned instances once the spam is mitigated. The admins of some of these may have just been asleep when this all started.

Ban Spam Accounts via their E-Mail Domain

Block the following E-Mail Domain and whatever temp Mail provider it resolves to: chitthi.in

Just to be safe, block these ones too (same provider)

• mailto.plus
• fexpost.com
• fexbox.org
• mailbox.in.ua
• any.pink

All our spam accounts came from these E-mails.

Since you probably have some of these accounts sleeping:

https://[your-instance.tld]/admin/accounts?email=%25%40chitthi.in there just select all and press “Ban”.

Find Remaining Spammers

I've seen instances that fixed the spam issue but began being hit later again. The spammers might use new E-Mails, so here is a way to find and block them anyway:

mamot.fr/@vincib/1119467019292…

IP Bans and TOR

These spammers seem to be using the TOR Network as all of their IPs are TOR Exit Node IPs, hence an idea (with some collateral damage if executed) would be to ban all TOR exit node IPs for sign ups. I am personally against this idea as you'd also prevent users who simply wish to stay anonymous online (political refugees, leakers of important documents, etc.) from using your platform. For now, simply banning every user using a particular Spammer IP will not help and will merely ban users that try to stay anonymous! Not necessarily the spammers.

How To Block All Temp E-Mails in the Future

If you want to prevent this from ever happening again, you should block E-Mails from Temporary Mail providers all together:

• Here is the list of all Temp email providers (there are both blocklist and allowlist)
• Here how to install it in Mastodon
• The script that automatically pulls the list via Cronjob and imports it into Mastodon
• Script template

Because of this, hessen.social, for example, was not affected by the spam attack! They had already banned the email domain the spammers used ages ago.

In future updates on Mastodon, maybe Admins can simply click a button that says “Ban Temp E-Mail Providers” Automagically from the E-Mail Menu? There could be E-Mail categories that can be banned, such as temporary mails.

Why did this happen?

The real reason hundreds of us spent hours of our days during the spam on mitigating it is the following:

Cyberbullying Gone Global: Fediverse Spam and Operation Beleaguer

This is the full exposé @cappy has been working on regarding the February 15th Spam Attacks!

Thank you @BrodieOnLinux@linuxrocks.online for mentioning this post in a video!

Good luck, everyone!
Thanks for participating in the Fediverse Experiment!

#FediBlock #FediAdmin

Cyberbullying Gone Global: Fediverse Spam and Operation Beleaguer

On February 15th, newly-created Fediverse accounts started posting spam messages from various instances, sending invites to a Discord server for a Japanese troll organization. This spam was widespread across the Fediverse.

^{Pornpipat "Cappy" Popum (Cats on a Keyboard)}

mastodon.de :MastodonDE:​

2023-07-31 12:12:44

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Kind regards,
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🤎🧡💛💚💙💜​​

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^{mastodon.de (Patreon)}

There is a big fucking bug in Mastodon's moderation features.

When I as a moderator suspend a remote account...

Expected behavior: The account can no longer be found or interacted with on our server and the account can't find or interact with accounts on our server.

Actual behavior: the account can still be found but is empty. there is a notice that the account is suspended and there is even still a follow button - it just doesn't do anything.
And the account can still see everything from our instance and interact with our posts. 🤯 Our users just won't reciprocate the interaction, because the reply won't appear here.
But if someone else replies to a reply from the suspended account we'll see that reply, but won't know what original post it belongs to.

Is this a new bug with Mastodon 4.3 or has it always been like that?
I've been moderating for 5 years now and this is new to me.

I'm not going to create an account on Microsoft™️ Github to officially file this bug report, but can someone tell me if it's already reported and what's the status? Thanks.

Additional ideal expected behavior: Previous replies to any of our posts by the suspended account won't be seen by anyone anywhere on the Fediverse - or at least not as replies to our posts, because our instance notifies/federates all other instances that these replies shouldn't be there.

#MastoMod #MastoAdmin #FediMod #FediAdmin #MastodonBug #moderation #Suspension