Access to the forum from South Korea
A couple of weeks ago, we blocked access to the forum from all IPs from South Korea. The forum had been under attack by some organised spammers for a few weeks, and it was ruining the forum. The attack was, presumably, using something like a botnet as there was a seemingly unending supply of different IPs used. Day after day, hundreds and hundreds of posts were being made and it was impossible to keep up with deleting and banning the accounts posting the spam. This was affecting the forum- people were complaining, and many were simply put off by finding page after page of nonsensical messages. The spam filter was not catching a lot of the messages as most didn't contain links but text pointing towards sites that were probably full of malware.
We put other measures in place and now the attack seems to be receeding, so we have lifted the block. I apologise to our many genuine users from South Korea, who have been greatly inconvenienced by this. However, we had no other option as the spammers were using so many different South Korean IPs that we could not stop them simply in the normal way by blocking individual addresses or batches, and lifted it as soon as possible to try to get everything back to normal. We have seen a lot of spam and advertising over the years in the forum, but this was on another level completely. I know it must have seemed strange and unfair to be denied access to a forum out of the blue that you have been using regularly, and hope you understand that it was a temporary response to a situation where the forum was being overwhelmed.
Categories: Asian Blog
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