Please report suspicious new members or posts


 
Chris Allingham

Chris Allingham

Administrator
Staff member
I want to ask everyone to report any suspicious new members or their posts that just don't feel right or seem too slick or seem out of place given the subject matter of our forum, so I can investigate and take any necessary actions. Simply click the "Report" link at the bottom of the post and let me know what your intuition is telling you. :unsure:

I posted about this subject yesterday but deleted my post, deciding that it was better to not mention specific user accounts as examples.

Thanks,
Chris
 
I saw an unusual new user post that I'm not seeing now but I gave them the benefit of the doubt because the posts seemed polite. Can you elaborate how the forum or we members could become compromised? I'm curious how we could be impacted. Thanks
 
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BFletcher said:
Can you elaborate how the forum or we members could become compromised? I'm curious how we could be impacted.
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First of all, we want to have real conversations with real people, not with bots or AI.

Secondly, there are people who join for the purpose of taking advantage of members. We had a recent incident where a new member almost enticed another member into a suspicious grill parts transaction. The member thought this was highly suspicious, did not send the money, and informed me so I could close the offending account.

Thirdly, some people join to entice members to visit websites that they are affiliated with, usually for financial gain. This is a violation of forum Terms of Service. But who knows if these websites are safe and trustworthy?

Finally, when someone joins who makes obvious efforts to conceal their identity in various ways (I have a few ways of detecting these behaviors) it makes me highly suspicious of their intentions. I don't know if they're joining to mess with members, to try to hack into the forum software, or they're just snooping around. But it's troublesome.
 
My grilling life is clearly an open and, opinionated book! Should anyone thing I’m any sort of “bot” look at my history, only an idiotic AI design try to replicate my antics!
Have a fabulous holiday season everyone! I’m going to sleep off the last round of turkey casserole!
 
BFletcher said:
Was the Traeger thread the work of AI?
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AI, or nefarious actors, I really don't care. They're not abiding the site's Terms of Service.

@Chris Allingham runs this site out of the goodness of his heart, and there's a lot of site administration that isn't completely pleasant. I was on the fence about reporting that original post...... and I probably should have, just because it did not pass my sniff test.
 
Bots will post a response usually to a very old thread and sometimes they'll have a weird summary of a post in that thread. They'll sometimes have a name that matches the theme. Then they'll come back after the fact and attempt to edit the post and put a nefarious ad or link on that post. This forum does a lot of things to block that behavior such as requiring real names and not allowing users to edit posts after a certain amount of time. There's another forum I read occasionally that is inundated with that sort of thing.
 
Dustin Dorsey said:
Bots will post a response usually to a very old thread and sometimes they'll have a weird summary of a post in that thread. They'll sometimes have a name that matches the theme. Then they'll come back after the fact and attempt to edit the post and put a nefarious ad or link on that post. This forum does a lot of things to block that behavior such as requiring real names and not allowing users to edit posts after a certain amount of time. There's another forum I read occasionally that is inundated with that sort of thing.
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The one constant with 'bots is that their patterns of activity will always be changing and not constant. Yeah, that's been a long standing issue with bulletin boards, but by no means is it going to be the only one. Short story is that if a new user seems out of place..... yeah, hit that report button for Chris.
 
Ok, if it helps, I can shed a little light (20+ years in CyberSec) on how this is a threat even on a fun bbq site. I too, don’t mind if someone sees my pics, but thats not the issue.
Probably the most common or likely threat is your account being taken over, the risk being that they get your email and login info. Once they have that, they’re off to the races. Using a technique called credential stuffing, they will then go try your username or email and password at practically every site imaginable, especially financial or banking. Since many follks DONT use multiple passwords for their accounts, the likelihood that this works is pretty high. An using a botnet, they can run millions of these attempts in literally seconds. And they don’t even care if any individual attempt doesn’t work, becuase they run in such massive quantities that the rule of large numbers means that some will, with bad consequences.
Even getting your email exposes you to phising ttempts, because knowing bbq is a passion helps them design an appealing email that gets you to click on a malicious link.
So THANK YOU CHRIS for looking out for us, keep up the great work !!
 
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BFletcher said:
This is unfathomable to me.

Thanks for the detail.
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You’re welcome. I agree on the pw piece, but people get sloppy. There’s a whole bigger password issue in the world, but I don’t want to turn this thread into a philosophical white paper.
 
I want to encourage members to use a unique, secure password for their forum accounts. Also, your email address is not visible to other members as part of private messages or in your forum profile, but if you give your email address to someone as part of a private conversation, all bets are off. :oops:
 
Chris Allingham said:
I want to encourage members to use a unique, secure password for their forum accounts. Also, your email address is not visible to other members as part of private messages or in your forum profile, but if you give your email address to someone as part of a private conversation, all bets are off. :oops:
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the easy avenue is to use the google PW generator for this or each site one has a PW on. and never use any banking or critical PW on any other websites.
 
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