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Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-02-24 04:49
by ronczap
I noticed a lot of new forum members being added where the first name and last name were the same. It looked like a BOT was responsible.

I contacted Tim and he banned the IP address and deleted about 30,000 bogus members. I was manually checking the member list and found more.

I decided to automate the process, so I wrote a vbscript which creates two InternetExplorer.Application objects.

It opens the member list in one IE window (sorted in descending Date Joined sequence).
The vbscript loops thru the HTML table on the page and opens the user profile for each username in the other IE window.
It captures the first and last names and the date joined and creates a .htm file containing username where the last name matched the first.

I set a limit of five pages (50 names on a page).

I also made a YouTube video of the script running (just one page of 50 members)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcoIxdq0Ros

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-02-26 15:03
by ronczap
I tweaked the vbscript to also check the "Most active forum" to see if a member has ever visited any forum.

More bogus members are being added - here is the latest result (looking at the 200 most recent added users)
Results.jpg
Results.jpg (110.46 KiB) Viewed 55754 times

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-22 19:39
by ronczap
Koweitta wrote:
2018-04-22 19:22
Is the vid deleted? I can't watch it.
Yes, I deleted it. It appears the bogus members are being filtered out now or the spammers moved on...

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-22 21:45
by botg
And there you actually replied to a spammer yourself.

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-22 21:52
by ronczap
botg wrote:
2018-04-22 21:45
And there you actually replied to a spammer yourself.
LOL - they are everywhere!

Tim, I assume you instituted some mechanism for identifying and purging these people (or bots)...

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-23 06:02
by botg
Common sense. A new user, posting only in off-topic, giving unhelpful replies only vaguely connected to the topic, that's a spambot or worse.

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-23 07:37
by boco
Neither of those we want and need here. Spamming human or spamming bot, doesn't matter.

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-23 13:03
by botg
It feels like every country with a capital >25°E with the exception of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand is inhabited solely by spammers.

Re: Vbscript Screen Scraping forum member list

Posted: 2018-04-23 13:33
by ronczap
botg wrote:
2018-04-23 13:03
It feels like every country with a capital >25°E with the exception of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand is inhabited solely by spammers.
I also find it amazing how many attempts to logon to my FileZilla server I get every day.
I have added a bunch of CIDR ranges to my IP Filter.

Been using https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup to see what country/location they are coming from and https://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr to convert the IP Range To CIDR