Today was a fun day. I started advertising my site finally using google's adwords & targeted placement which has been working well for me, not phenomenal, but well. The membership growth is still at a level that over a few hours I can look at each profile that comes in and check it, the Access Management does a great job of pairing up matching IP's to watch out for those who might attempt to be scammers/spammers and isolate them for me to review first, and the scamnet does a great job of catching the e-mails that these idiots try to send out.
But today, I only needed 2 of the tools of my site. My site's Instant Messenger (Thank you for this option on the sites Boonex) and the Access Management that was created by AntonLV. A few other items came into play for this also and worked wonderfully. Let me explain how it happened.
I logged into my site, members side (not Admin) and almost instantly I got an IM from a new (and mind you by the photo very attractive 22 year old lady) who wanted to talk. Okay, I can take a moment to talk to a member and see what's up, obviously this took me to her profile EVEN Faster to see what she had on it. What? I'm a guy and I'm not married right now, I'm allowed to look aren't I?
Well, it said she was from SF, CA on the profile and it seemed like a 22 year olds profile would seem, not much content and horid grammar. I also noted the English was less than perfect in chatting with this individual (No, I don't believe it was the person in the pic). As we're chatting she says she's does porn movies (okay, red flag one as my site is definitely PG)... I continue to chat and feel her out as I'm hop into the Admin panel to grab the IP on her and check it out... That's when Access Management became so useful. Within 14 minutes of the first profile being created a 2nd profile was created (this one even more horid than the first, though still an attractive female pic) only it said that person was from Virginia and had the same IP as the first one... Hmmmm....
So this meant it was time for some fun... Find out what this person wanted and then block the IP, seems simple enough right? So, this individual asks to move to off-site messenger so I give out one of my yahoo messenger ID's that I don't use very often and decided to take the conversation there. Within a few minutes I identified myself as the site owner, played along like I needed a model for Ads that I run and more less had a little fun. The individual then requested I join teenlove.com (a paid sex chat site, some of you may not mind this so far.) and that's when I said sure, and hopped into the admin panel to block the IP's and do away with this person.
Oh, if it had been so simple from that point on... They became irate and threatened to run a DDOS Attack on my server, knock it offline for 6 hours, hotswap my database and many other things... I went ahead and ran the IP used to sign up, they made a huge novice mistake and didn't proxy it when joining, and made contact with my host who added a couple security measures to the server with cron jobs and rules for mod_evasive and obviously I already run Brute Force. Now, I'm not a guru when it comes to the server, that is what my host is for and I pay them to make sure this thing is as close to unhackable as it can be.
Next, we sat back and watched this idiot hacker (I could of done a better job and I really don't know anything about servers) attempt to come straight into my server and try the wrong password and the wrong port... It didn't take long for BruteForce to kick him out. Of course, it was on the same exact IP that the idiot attempted to join on.
Next, I pulled the server logs showing the futile, but still an attempt, to access the server, contacted the Long Beach California Police Department and have provided them with both the conversation and server logs. Did you know it's a real crime to threaten to take down someone's server? It's an even bigger crime to actually attempt to do it. Now, this novice hacker has been swatted, the site took zero seconds down time and the internet community is a safer place without this idiot who wanted to get credit card information via a sex cam chat site.
The purpose of this thread is to say thank you to a few people for building a script that if we pay attention to what we are doing and who is on our sites, makes it so we can protect them. So, here is the list of individuals I owe this thanks to:
Boonex Staff. You guys have created an awesome script, that while it takes some time to learn how to use it, does a phenomenal job of allowing us site owners to communicate with members and find out what they want without always having to announce ourselves as Admin from the start.
AntonLV, you have created some amazing mods that you know I use on my site and they performed better than I could of hoped they would of. I didn't even have to go look for the duplicate IP accounts. Your mod placed them one right about the other and pointed them out to me to check. This is exactly what Dolphin sites need and you did an awesome job with it.
I hate this part... But I have to thank all who have contributed... Sammie, we may not see eye to eye on many things but I have to say thank you for your mod on hackers, it performs wonderfully and allows me to run the site the way I want it to run while giving major piece of mind when it comes to making my site perform seamlessly... Yes, I am saying thank you to you for this....
Now, I'm off to learn the rules for some of my security features so I can see if there is anything else the site needs to protect it from future idiots.
Thanks guys for all the hard work it takes to create a script like this and making it all flow so seamlessly... One Amateur Hacker down and a zillion to go... :))
