Spam in Private Messages

[drscorpio]

We have had a huge influx of spam being sent by private message. Please continue to report them. 

[rawTOP]

I've taken a pretty close look at what was happening. I've deleted the accounts of the people who were spammers (which should delete the messages). I've also devised a SQL query that helps me identify people who are spamming through the message system, which I'll check periodically. I won't go into the details of the patterns I noticed, since I don't want hackers knowing what not to do. But the attack seemed to come from Ukraine.

I also noticed a problem where it seemed a few users (@Botsub, @mplsnegpig4poz & @bbcunthole) have had their account passwords compromised and weird things were happening as a result. I've changed those users passwords – they'll need to do a "I forgot my password" to reset their passwords. That should solve the issue of hackers using their account provided the hackers don't have access to their email account as well.

Edit: Actually, I'm not confident that those users had their passwords compromised. The more I look at it the odder it looks. It may be a glitch in the system where, when I delete a user, stuff goes into the moderation log that doesn't belong there. I had banned the IP address used by those users. That's reversed. But I can't restore their passwords, so they'll need to do a "forgot password" (sorry about that, assuming it was a random glitch that caused me to modify your password.)

[ChaserCurious]

How do we report spam messages?  I just got one, but didn’t see a clear way to “report as spam”. 

[rawTOP]

I should mention that some of you who had spam sent to you… Yesterday I deleted the spam, but then created a different problem where you weren't able to use messaging. That was corrected this morning after about a half dozen of you sent support requests.