To all Fedi Admins currently being hit with a spam wave:

Defederate from these instances:

[Full List of Affected Instances Here]

Limit first, defederate only in worst situations!

Reconsider re-federating with any of the mentioned instances once the spam is mitigated. The admins of some of these may have just been asleep when this all started.

Ban Spam Accounts via their E-Mail Domain

Block the following E-Mail Domain and whatever temp Mail provider it resolves to: chitthi.in

Just to be safe, block these ones too (same provider)

• mailto.plus
• fexpost.com
• fexbox.org
• mailbox.in.ua
• any.pink

All our spam accounts came from these E-mails.

Since you probably have some of these accounts sleeping:

https://[your-instance.tld]/admin/accounts?email=%25%40chitthi.in there just select all and press “Ban”.

Find Remaining Spammers

I've seen instances that fixed the spam issue but began being hit later again. The spammers might use new E-Mails, so here is a way to find and block them anyway:

https://mamot.fr/@vincib/111946701929274350

IP Bans and TOR

These spammers seem to be using the TOR Network as all of their IPs are TOR Exit Node IPs, hence an idea (with some collateral damage if executed) would be to ban all TOR exit node IPs for sign ups. I am personally against this idea as you'd also prevent users who simply wish to stay anonymous online (political refugees, leakers of important documents, etc.) from using your platform. For now, simply banning every user using a particular Spammer IP will not help and will merely ban users that try to stay anonymous! Not necessarily the spammers.

How To Block All Temp E-Mails in the Future

If you want to prevent this from ever happening again, you should block E-Mails from Temporary Mail providers all together:

• Here is the list of all Temp email providers (there are both blocklist and allowlist)
• Here how to install it in Mastodon
• The script that automatically pulls the list via Cronjob and imports it into Mastodon
• Script template

Because of this, hessen.social, for example, was not affected by the spam attack! They had already banned the email domain the spammers used ages ago.

In future updates on Mastodon, maybe Admins can simply click a button that says “Ban Temp E-Mail Providers” Automagically from the E-Mail Menu? There could be E-Mail categories that can be banned, such as temporary mails.

Why did this happen?

We're probably all looking for answers as to why this spam wave happened to begin with. As much as I do not want to believe this was the real reason hundreds of us spent hours of our day today on mitigating this issue, here is a real explanation on why this spam wave came to be:

Part 1:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psdqurvye
Part 2:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9psnooe6p1
Part 3:
https://fedi.fyralabs.com/notes/9pth6oh3xr

As noted, @cappy is working on a full exposé regarding the origin of the February 16th Spam Attacks. I'm patiently awaiting their work's publishing!

Good luck, everyone!
Thanks for participating in the Fediverse Experiment!

#FediBlock #FediAdmin