SPAM Issues May 2026
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We suffered a SPAM attack from May 1-6, which unfortunately corresponded with time off for lots of IT staff, including a Monday holiday. We declared an incident early on 6 May and started working on the problems. We have taken the following actions, which may disrupt some legitimate users, but hopefully few:
- We've invalidated all existing logged in sessions, to force all users to re-authenticate
- We've invalidated all passwords for users who have not logged in for over a year, forcing them to reset their password (and by doing so, validate that they still control the email address associated with the account)
- We now ban and invalidate users logging in with curl or wget in their user agent string, and mark any existing posts by that user as spam
- We've mass-spammed some thousands of existing posts / topics, though there's more still to tidy up
We will be continuing to try and add some defenses agaisnt this and clean up SPAM As we find it.
Our apologies for any interruption and hopefully we have minimized the problem
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One way or another, they're still at it
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I reported one as SPAM this morning, as well.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
The system just got rapid fire blasted by mulitiple (didn't count them) spams.
--Jeff Moden
RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally) -
Yeah, there have been multiple attacks. I got over 200 spam article submissions as well that I had to delete.
We're working to identify some patterns, like WGET/CURL posts and block them. I was told we are also standing up an AWS WAF (firewall) that can do some packet inspection for patterns and block things before the web/db servers have to see them
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