Recommendation for legitimate website check please

Alicia J said:

This one listed above.
anti-hacker-alliance website.

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Thank you for all your replies. It was a website someone suggested would be useful but I don’t think so from what I can see, and the info here.

With Defender, Malwarebytes and just the browser's built in security, you should be fine.


Seriously though... get some backup software and use it religiously.

Macrium has a free version which has the ability to make bootable media, so you can access your backups, even when Windows won't boot.

Alicia J said:

Thanks. I manually approve/disapprove registrations to a website I monitor and was using

Stop Forum Spam

I was just trying to add an alternative to my handy web tools.

Look into this.Anti Spam Plugin - Spam Protection by Cleantalk

Avoid the website. It is useless and uses outdated Apache server and incorrectly configured TLS. Which on second thoughts is probably why it is flagged by Malwarebytes as a security risk.

As for forum registration - all forums are plagued by spammers. Instead of subscribing to blocklists you might use an anti spam plugin along with wildcard ip address blocking for persistent spammers especially if they are using proxies.

So what I meant was that if you have to spend hours going through multiple registrations or posts in order to decide if they are legitimate and root out hundreds of spammers then to save time and effort you can use ip address wildcard blocking.

You can export the ip address blocks into a spreadheet.

Major IP Addresses Blocks By Country

It helps if you can also view/ export user ip addresses from your website.

Most spammers use proxies and the ip address used doesn't resolve to their actual ip address. They want to hide so reporting an ip address to a spam blacklist does nothing and is pointless even if it makes you feel better. For serious abuse you'd need to report to the user's isp.

Anyway if your forum is intended for a worldwide audience then blocking is problematic. If your forum is only intended for say English speaking users in certain countries then it's easier.

Let's say that you are getting multiple registrations or spam comments from ip addresses in one range (ip addresses assigned to one country) in rapid succession or even from many similar ip addresses on the same day then look up the location in the database that you created.

Example:

You see multiple problematic users originating in the Philippines:

Major IP Address Blocks For Philippines

With ip addresses in the range:

58.97.160.0 to 58.97.191.255

or

117.58.192.0 to 117.58.223.255

As an example you could add a wildcard ip address block:

58.97.1*
117.58.1*
117.58.2*

Then even if the proxy used obtains a new ip address in the same range - users would still be blocked and they will give up bothering your forum and target someone else.

If you just focus your attention on where you see patterns developing (similar ip addresses used in the same originating country) add wildcard blocks as required and after a week or two you should only be seeing a few instances of spam per day.

Just my thoughts.

In addition if it's a WordPress site you could use something like this:

Proxy & VPN Blocker | Proxy & VPN Blocker for WordPress

My personal experience only extends to moderating three websites built using ExpressionEngine along with one using WordPress and only intended for a UK audience.