CoffeeGeek

I'm confused about something and hope some tech-savvy folks here can answer:

Why would some spam bot all of a sudden flood the signups for our newsletter on CoffeeGeek? Today we've had well over 500 signups -- all yahoo accounts and all obviously fake - via our website's signup form.

I don't get it. AFAIK, they can't "hack" anything to gain our mailing list, etc.

Jan 10, 2025 at 10:55pmWeb
Show threadIsaac MJan 10, 2025
@coffeegeek Maybe they are testing out some type of hacking process/scripts that would be used for a different attack / different site later on?
Show threadCoffeeGeekJan 10, 2025
@ossa I'm gobsmaked how they get by the captcha. I guess the V3 captcha from google isn't working as well as it should.
Show threadHeatherJan 11, 2025

@coffeegeek
Yikes!
A wild guess, but there's a chance it may not be about you, maybe they are working at breaking the captcha (machine learning?).
I'm that case turning off subscription for awhile may get them to go somewhere else.
Or I'm totally wrong, and it is about you, in which case you may also want to turn them off temporarily while waiting out the attack.

Good luck.

Show threadEndarethJan 11, 2025
@coffeegeek @ossa Bots can generally do at least as well as humans for solving captchas these days, just take a look at everything that shows up at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bot+solving+captcha+v3&t=ffip&ia=web
bot solving captcha v3 at DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo. Privacy, Simplified.

Show threadgrouchoxJan 10, 2025
@coffeegeek I wpuld guess regular mail traffic from a trusted source will make a bot address seem less spammy to watchdogs?
Show threadLionelBJan 11, 2025

@coffeegeek

I would think it is to consume your time and cause annoyance. A harassment rather than something technical?

Show threadCoffeeGeekJan 11, 2025

@lionelb the one possible bad outcome is that we're about 750 subs away from going to a higher price tier on our newsletter delivery service. I don't mind paying the higher rate for legit subscribers, but I'm not going to pay for fake ones (when we hit 15K, it jumps nearly $100 more a month).

Will stay on top of it. For now, I'm just auto-adding all these new signups to a specific contacts list should I have to deal with them.

I don't like telling our advertisers fake numbers. We normally gain about 15-35 new subscribers a day. Today it's 600+ and climbing.

Show threadEU Citizen🇪🇺Jan 11, 2025
@coffeegeek
Shot in the dark: Looking for the giveaways or more generally. They subscribe to every newsletter to get some sort of discount.