We have been carefully monitoring our support board and websites and found that there are many hackers and robots that are attempting to gain access to SMF to place SPAM, Porn and create fake user accounts possibly for later use to add SPAM and other thing to an SMF site. The majority of robots and hackers are found to be from Russia; so we have basically blocked the whole country of Russia from accessing our sites.
If you are getting such attacks and/or breaches, you can use our methods to help alleviate the issue from your sites. There are a few ways that can help you achieve this in SMF 2.0.13:
- Use the SMF ban list in Admin->Features & Options->Members->Ban List->Add New Ban use "Ban on Email Address" to block all the emails from Russia (*.ru). Also block (*.*.*.*@*), this email format has been noticed in a lot of fake accounts.
- Create a .htaccess file that will deny all the IP Addresses Blocks from the country. We have included a file titled "Blocking Russia.txt" which contains the .htaccess entries that we use. You can modify this list to consolidate, add or remove entries to suit your needs. The .htaccess file should go into the folder where you have SMF installed. We also place these entries into our .htaccess file in the root folder for our main website. Doing this will let the server handle all the blocking so that SMF will not be burdened with this task.
We obtained our IP lists for our .htaccess file from http://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/index.html
Download file updated 04/14/2017
For a more complete solution use BotBanish to protect your forums, shopping carts and websites.
Download at http://botbanish.com (http://botbanish.com)