Randem Systems Support Board

This scam revolves around your computer being frozen with a threat appearing on the screen that you should not turn off your computer and you need to pay some outrageous amount in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency.

All you need to do is to hold down the power button on your device for 8 - 10 seconds until the device turns off completely, wait 10 seconds then turn your device back on and wa-la the ransomware is gone. The reason that you got this infection in the first place is that you went to a website and a drive by download happened and just made your keyboard and mouse seeming not work.

Now, if you were to leave your computer on and the scammer did actually get you to download a program to encrypt your data, then longer the computer is on the more time it has to encrypt your data.

Receiving anonymous phone calls from service providers are on the rise. They rely on scaring you that your account will be terminated or disconnected if you do not react quickly. You can easily tell these fraudulent scam calls.

1 - The obvious one is that you do not use the service they are calling about.

2 - The robo call is very vague on information. No account number, name or other readily identifying information that it is about your account. The vagueness is intentional to get you to call them to ask questions, then they have you!

3 - The phone number is not from the service provider you use. This is easy to check with a simple Google search. The best way is to check the phone number on your bill and call it.

Always block these fake phone numbers. We know that they use different numbers all the time but it helps your phone company track fraudulent calls and if they do use the same number you will not get the call anyway.

More and more people are being caught by scammers these days. It is really easy to determine if you have been sent a real invoice or payment notification about your credit card or account or even a tech support scam. Here are some ways to detect a scam.

1 - The first thing that you do is to look at the FROM field on the email. If the email address is from a FREE email account such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, outlook.com or aol.com; IT IS A SCAM!!!. No legitimate company will use a FREE email account. The company will for example PayPal will send from a domain of paypal.com, Microsoft will send from the domain microsoft.com and so on...

2 - Obvious misspelled words in the email. No legit company would send out unchecked emails.

3- If you have an account with the company in question they will address the email to you personally. They will not use Dear Customer or Dear Subscriber etc...

4 - If you viewed or clicked on a link in the email; check the url (the place at the top of your browser where https: or http is displayed). It should also have the company domain name at the beginning of it before the first slash (IE. paypal.com, microsoft.com). If it has some other destination address, it is a fraudulent web page you will be going to so do not trust it!

5 - Do not go to any website you are told to go to or call any number to fix the issue. you will just give remote control of your computer to the scammers, then they will ask you to log onto your bank account or PayPal account which will give them access to your finances and they can capture your username and password to your account.

Call your local computer professional and ask questions. Do not give control to someone who you do not know and will never meet!

Remove the One Drive option from Microsoft Office products. Download, unzip then double click on the .reg file to add the information to your registry. One Drive will no longer be your default saving location while in MS Office.

Released - Version 4.1 Build 5

CHG: Modified the SMF MailQueue so that it will send emails that are in the MailQueue.

CHG: Changed the sort direction for the dates in Analytics. The latest dates are now at the top.

ADD: Added blocked message counts to Analytics.

ADD: [WordPress] wp-config.php protection is now in settings.

ADD: [WordPress] Configuration Setting update BotBanish Settings table not just WordPress settings table.

ADD: .htaccess protection is now in setting.

FIX: .htaccess file that did not start with cr/lf before a BotBanish header would go into an endless loop on BotBanish uninstall.

CHG: Language files are now database tables. Removed language files from install. Language files for SMF still exist.

NEW: Signature, Website title and website URL for users will not to be allowed to show until a set number of post have been achieved. Will only work on SMF 2.1.x and higher. Default 10 posts. Helps to prevent forum spamming with signature and website URL's links from infrequent users and spammers.

CHG: Various modifications and fixes.
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07/04/2023 - Version 4.1 Build 4

CHG: .htaccess modifications. Will now attempt to remove any BotBanish instructions from .htaccess upon install to make sure that any installation failure can be cleaned up before re-install.

CHG: Bot resource lockout generated email/notice each time IP was encountered. Will now only generate one email/notice the first time IP is encountered.
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06/30/2023 - Version 4.1 Build 3

FIX: [WordPress] Viewing logs on some systems showed logs without line separators (CR/LF).

ADD: [WordPress] Xmlrpc Protection added.

CHG: [WordPress] Improved plugin activation and work flow.
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06/21/2023 - Version 4.1 Build 2

FIX: When uninstalling, a session error would exist when attempting to delete the package.

FIX: Incorrect displays in some language texts.

FIX: Package Manager would report incorrect version for update.

FIX: On some systems a 404 Document error would trigger a replacement of the root favicon.ico file with it's own file. BotBanish will now check to see if this favicon.ico file is really missing before copying one to the root.

CHG: Added additional information to some messages.

FIX: Various fixes and modifications.
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05/21/2023 - Version 4.1 Build 1

FIX: Various fixes and modifications.
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05/12/2023 - Version 4.1 Build 0

FIX: Time zone at install will take the current time zone of SMF. It can also be changed in BotBanish settings.

FIX: Corrected changes in .htaccess that took commands that were commented out as actual commands.

CHG: Improved language support.

CHG: Improved messaging.

CHG: Faster processing for Analytics.

CHG: Added new fields to some tables on install for user saved old data tables.

NEW: Added new settings and functionality

NEW: Added country blocking. Whole countries can now be blocked.

CHG: Added country and flag information to several areas of analytics.

CHG: Lessened data traffic to server for better client performance.

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12/28/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 6

FIX: New version checking restored in package manager.

FIX: When adding / removing spiders or IP's from the whitelist / blacklist, they are now added / removed from the .htaccess file also.

FIX: User additions to the applications database used table names that were not consistent with current usage (not all lowercase). Adjusted BotBanish to use names as they appear in the database in the Dump Database process (case does not matter).

CHG: Various changes to Analytics.

CHG: Added referrer to be shown in Analytics.
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10/09/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 5

FIX: Error in altered ShowAttachments.php that would not count the downloads if initiated by a spider or an admin. This error only happened in some SMF 2.1 rc releases.

FIX: Error on install for SMF 2.1.2 in ShowAttachments.php and some versions of SMF 2.1 rc releases.

CHG: Allowed client bad spider/bot check to determine if override is needed.

CHG: Improved bot whitelist / blacklist processing on client side.

CHG: Removed referrer from being shown on Analytics.

CHG: PHP 8.1.11 compatible.
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08/31/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 4

CHG: Hidden bot detection would place incorrect detection times in the client BotBanishClient_IP table.

CHG: Moved BotBanish Image folder.

CHG: Enlarged username field in email table to capture rogue bots that attempt to login to forums.

CHG: Improved fake user login detection.

CHG: Improved bot detection on registration.
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08/19/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 3

FIX: Corrected spider ordering. An error would be generated when reordering occurred.

FIX: Corrected issue with deleting bot data from htaccess table.

FIX: Corrected htaccess table being flushed to .htaccess file. Data would stay in the table and not be written to .htaccess file.

ADD: Ability to manage log files. default is 30 log files of each type to be kept. Will delete earliest version of logs of any type after reaching the max number stored on file system.

FIX: Corrected download count tracking for attachment downloads. This also affects BotBanish Analytics download tracking.

FIX: On some systems; errors would be generated when zipping of files for backup purposes on install even though the backup would complete successfully.

ADD: Allowed user to select NOT to delete BotBanish data on uninstall so that a new install can use the retained data.

NEW: Ability to view BotBanish log files in BotBanish Analytics.

CHG: Allowed invalid searches for image files (.png/.gif/.jpg) not to trigger 404 errors to the log files and database tables.

CHG: Corrected error 404 reporting to report actual URL causing the error.

CHG: Corrected issue with download tracking giving errors (SMF).
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08/09/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 2

CHG: Allowed BotBanish Analytics to track URL's. Prior versions only tracked webpage names. Best if used with SEO URL's.
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07/29/2022 - Version 4.0 Build 1

CHG: Default configuration is NOT to use the .htaccess file for IP blocking but will use bot blocking in the file. .htaccess file sizes got too big.

CHG: Removed support for earlier versions of BotBanish (Pre 4.0). Some tables have changed considerably.

CHG: Moved settings to a database table.

CHG: Many operations.
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Hi,
Here I am again.
Apache 2.4.52
Php 7.4.28
SMF Version from: SMF 2.0.19

I am trying to update BotBanish from 3.5.02 to 3.6.04.

I have tried to uninstall 3.5.02, and broke SMF, so I  restored SMF.
There are several .htaccess files and several 2019-06-16_backup_BotBanish_Client_SMF_v3.tar.gz
and several 2019-06-16_before_BotBanish_Client_SMF_v3_X.tar.gz.

Looks like duplicates with different dates.

Not really sure where to start, and what files need to be saved and what files can be removed.

An update was needed to make BotBanish 3.6.05 compatible with SMF 2.1.1. This is BotBanish 3.6.06.
Download and install in place of BotBanish 3.6.05 and lower for SMF 2.1 RC*.

Not a valid attachment ID.

In version BotBanish 3.6.xx you will need to replace a file in the BotBanish/bot/Subs/ folder to eliminate writing ip and user agent entries into the .htaccess file with the attached file.

You will also need to remove all entries in the .htaccess file between the tags

# * * * * * BotBanish IP Start * * * * *
# * * * * * BotBanish IP End * * * * *

AND

# * * * * * BotBanish BOT Start (REWRITECOND) * * * * *
# * * * * * BotBanish BOT End (REWRITECOND) * * * * *

This will decrease the size of your .htaccess file to a normal size and BotBanish will not add new entries to it after replacing the BotBanish_Subs.php file. This will also fix the error if you loose access to your site because of a 503 error due to an error in the .htaccess update.

If you are having trouble getting PHPMailer to work, we have created an auto-loader to help. To use it just follow this simple procedure. Download PHPMailer and place in the folder "vendor", change all folders names to lowercase for the PHPMailer folders. Download our Autoloader Class and use the following code. This will load all the needed PHPMailer files needed to run PHPMailer.

//================================================================
// Setup Email Settings
//
// Must be in main section. CANNOT be in a code block!!!
//
// PHPMailer
//================================================================

use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
  use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\OAuth;
  use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;

$dirs = array(/vendor/phpmailer/phpmailer/src');
$exceptions = array('get_oauth_token.php');

include 'autoload.php';
$PHPMailer_Autoload = new Autoload($dirs, $exceptions);
$PHPMailer_Autoload->load();


In some instances you may want to use an online sitemap generator such as Xml Site Generator (https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/) to generate a sitemap. If the generator cannot find your site or is blocked from accessing your site you should find the IP address of the site that is sending the spider to crawl your site to generate the sitemap then remove it from your .htaccess file and add the IP to your BotBanish table (botbanishclient_ip_dnb), so that it will not be blocked in the future.

I.E. The IP for xmlsitemapgenerator is 52.166.181.85. You can find this IP by pinging xmlsitegenerator.org