Sending spammers to password purgatory (opens in new tab)

We'll manually review all accounts that use (more than one of) those ip addresses. Works like a charm! :-)

A lot of the crap real sites make people go through e.g. when they lose access to their account or login to a VPN or the site just "can't verify their identity" for some reason. Where you go through a bunch of hoops and captchas, only to have some step fail or reach a dead end. They really seem like they're just set up to intentionally waste people's time.

For example, Steam has a system where if you enter too many invalid passwords, it will present you with a captcha which you can never actually solve. It's a lot more annoying than just saying "you have been locked out of trying to log in for X hours".

But this, this is fine. It's pretty clear that the person you're targeting is a spammer, and it's pretty clear to the user after about 60 seconds that you're password system is a joke.

'Password must contain at least 1 primary Simpsons family character'

'Password must contain at least 1 Nordic character'

'Password must contain at least 1 Greek character'

'Password must contain at least 1 primary Griffin family character'

'Password must contain at least one emoticon'

'Password when stripped of non-numeric characters must be a number divisible by 3'

[1] https://github.com/troyhunt/password-purgatory-api/blob/mast...

I did the same thing 10 years ago and it was one of the best morale builders for our team after all the time we spent dealing with these folks.

https://www.brightball.com/articles/waste-spammers-time-to-r...

So I pick up spam calls, press 1 immediately, then put the phone back in my pocket. This usually connects it to a real person who hears ambient noise, thinking I'm nearby. Usually I waste like 60sec of their time for 2sec of my time. It's hard for them to protect against this because no matter what, they need some victims to talk to the real person, unless they develop a very smart AI. But a relatively simple bot with a list of likely scam numbers could automate the fake victim's side.

A colleague was dealing with more advanced scammers who had already made some progress with his unaware mother. Their scam was unique in that it required calling them back. He managed to collect all the phone numbers they were using, then he put up fake Craigslist ads for free couches... and you can guess the rest.

Believable, stupid requirements I've seen in the wild in the bad early days of complexity requirements.

- your password contains a common word

- your password contains one or more repeating characters

- your password contains a forbidden character

- your password needs at least one additional uppercase letter

- your password needs at least one more distinct special character

- your password cannot end with a special character

- your password contains an escalating series of numbers

- your password is too short

- your password is too long

Original title in full is: Sending Spammers to Password Purgatory with Microsoft Power Automate and Cloudflare Workers KV

Don't do that. No, really, don't.

Okay, you didn't listen and did it anyway; please, at least don't automate it or semi-automate it where you're just doing it with one click.

> Spammer burned a total of 80 seconds in Password Purgatory

So you think, based on the belief that when you reply to the spam, it goes back to the spammer.

That may not be the case; when you engage spam, you are possibly generating "backscatter"; a person having nothing to do with the spammer may receive the e-mail.

Spam messages are not always relying on someone replying to them to hook in the victim. Sometimes there is no hook at all, or sometimes the hook is in the HTML links, and not in replying. (They additionally hope that if you reply, the person you are replying to will also get the spam e-mail, since it is quoted, and that person will click on the links.)

My own low-effort method is to accept mail for any domain on my name servers. Spammers think they are relaying their scams but it just goes to a flat text file. It isn't like I try to hide it. The banner even says its a honeypot and not to use it.

    139K /var/spool/mail/vhosts/crap
    24K  /var/spool/mail/vhosts/crap
    177K /var/spool/mail/vhosts/crap
    196K /var/spool/mail/vhosts/crap

They’re not typically trying to get you to reply - they’re trying to get you to click a link.

To be really evil, Troy should play with the password field- make it not a text or password field, but rather some sort of custom input field that doesn’t work with password managers and doesn’t allow paste.

Also maybe return errors sometimes that are themselves erroneous.

1. marcopollo – Password must contain at least two numbers. 2. marcopollo11 – Password must not begin or end with a number. 3. m1arcopoll1o – Password must not contain two of the same number. 4. m1arcopoll2o – Password must contain at least one special character (! ? & % $ # @). 5. m1arcopoll2o! – Password must not end with a special character. 5. m1arcopoll2!o - Password must not contain 3 or more of the same letter. 6. m1arcopoll2p! - Password must not contain 2 of the same consecutive character. 7. I forget, but it kept going.

At some point, I gave up and started generating random passwords. The first 3 attempts were still not accepted. In a way, those restrictions were actually reducing the entropy.

- Arrive, Raise Hell, Leave

For better or for worse, "publicizing spammers pain for our pleasure" has a guaranteed effect of shortening the useful lifespan of this tool. Unless of course no spammers ever read that article, OR HN.

1. Ask for a username, only offer "OK"

2. Upon OK: Wait 2-3s while showing an ajax spinner, then add another box to the DOM, asking for an "e-mail"

3. Rinse and repeat with first name + last name; then company name; country (pick from a list of ~50 widely known country names, sorted by median age of the population - remove the IPs country of origin, so they have to pick "other" and enter it manually)

4. Tell the user the username doesn't match the expected format and offer to add a random "#1234" for them - upon doing so, back to square one (except their username is now "#1234" and not "scamoverlord#1234"). make sure to flush the other info as well.

5.1. Tell them you're sending a verification mail (you don't). Offer them to resent it after 30s.

5.2. Upon "try again", tell them first to check their mail address, and lock the "try again" for another 10s.

5.3. Now, after another 30s, tell them there must be an error with the mail gateway (there is no mail gateway) and offer them to continue; the verification mail is queued and will be sent later (-> you're sooo super userfriendly!).

6. Now the user/victim easily spent 90s to enter "valid" details and must be quite invested. Show a re-captcha style captcha before asking for password (after sending an email and possibly spamming someone? yeah, maybe put that before the fake mail verification, I came up with that in the wrong order).

7. the "checking if you're human" should fail after 3-4s (spammers are used to that).

8. Then the first of the 9 captcha images should pop up afer 1-2s initial "loading time", the other ones after another .5 - 2s, each.

9. Let the first one or two captchas fail no matter what (two if they're fast, one if they're already spending a lot of time there - plausible if you're handpick terms + images for which foreign speaker often don't know the exact meaning; like "barnacles", "melange", "cabin", "truck", or showing differnt styles buses and asking for "tram").

10. Three times the charm: Accept any answer, as long as the "user" spent more than 4s on it (use a simple term with obvious images to make it plausible, like "birds" or "cars").

11. finally get started with the password. Let them do four or six levels.

12. What's that, the the captcha timed out and/or too many bad password tries? Are you sure you're not a bot? Well, do it again! (maybe let them only fail once to keep them hooked)

13. Oh no, the password field has been reset after the captcha was solved. At least you now know how to do a rule-abiding password. So let them do all the levels.

14. If they're really persistent, fake a "oh no, your tab crashed, reload?" screen for their browser.

Uuuuh, I think I put that on my infinite todo list.

PS: Have them write "a few words" about their business. Make sure to garble copy/paste (e.g. reverse word order or just reset length counter to 0, increase decrease from there and do a proper recount on submit). On submit, verify the input for a few seconds and claim that it's either to short or too long (if they wrote >500 chars, say it should be 200-400, if they wrote <500 chars, ask for 600-800). And remember to keep the char counter broken (update only after not typing for 2s, making the input field not readable for another second while "counting"). Bonus points if a WYSIWYG editor widget is used, which of course takes 5 to 10s to load; or have a "worker" at Amazon Mechanical Turk review it (only takes 30 to 90s).

PPS, for balls of steel: Add a second act by only enforcing the first few levels. Then, upon login, tell them they need to change their password. Maybe also tell them if they install your "super special" security extension, they can use weaker password rules. If they stupid enough to really install it, let it send a "X-Block-Me: I am a scammer" header along with every http/s request.

  Spammer burned a total of 80 seconds in Password Purgatory