Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
Seeing a lot of spam comments in the last few minutes from accounts that all have similar names. Omitting name since it is NSFW.
It sure looks like it; every front page post has a dozen or so comments from unique bot accounts.
Hopefully we don't see a 'Show HN: I created a spam bot service to advertise on every HN post' soon.
What a mess, this is literally the first time I saw something like this on HN. They've even started posting on this thread! HN has been running slow since the flood started and I wonder if it's causing a mini-DDoS effect.
The usernames of the spammers are "2genders", "SEXMCNIGGA", and "indianmilf"; for some strange reason they keep the same prefix and just alter the number so it should be easy for admins to block them. Some of them are posting Twitter links as well.
Yup. The site being advertised is proxied through Cloudflare, and they're also using Supabase.
Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.
I laughed pretty hard when I noticed the same issues and clicked the 'discuss' link and found that your post had been inundated with the comments you are referring to XD
Has been loading slow for me. Also reddit seems to be down. And Google login on Twitter hung for me.
Anyone have some insight into the motivation of spam bot behavior? It doesn't make sense to me that they'd intentionally re-post the same link on a story 100+ times. Perhaps repeating the same link is good for SEO farming? Or somehow there's a belief that 100+ identical comments is more effective than just a few?
Also the comments all seem to end with a 15 character random string, which I assume is just there to add entropy and avoid identical comment detection.
Would love to see a postmortem once it's dealt with.
It’s been happening for hours and is killing site performance. It’s all from brand new accounts. I don’t why account creation hasn’t been turned off yet.
Clearly, I'm surprised there isn't a spam filter that detects this obvious attack.
There are apps currently make multi six figures a month with "AI girlfriend services". Not for me but it apparently is worth paying for to some people. But hell, one time I was scrolling through this hot person's Instagram and it took me a good minute or two to realize the whole account was a generative AI account, almost tricked me. Give it another decade and we can reevaluate.
Yep, I am sure it happens but this is the first time I've actually seen it!
Kind of strange this is still going on. They’re all new accounts so why not just disable account creation?
Oh my god, you aren’t kidding. As of right now, there’s 350 (plus or minus a few) dead spam comments at the bottom of this page. Someone obviously misplaced a decimal somewhere - you obviously don’t want to flood a forum with THAT many bot messages.
Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames.
Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code…
Amateur stuff.
Never seen it happen before though!
Interestingly, reddit seems have gone down about 30-40 minutes ago too.
It's the day after the YC application deadline, so my hypothesis is resources that would otherwise be dealing with these script kiddies spamming HN are spread thin at the moment...
Why SEXMCNIGGA though? Shouldn't a bot try to pass as a user?
At the end of each spam message there is a unique 15 character string. Anyone know what purpose the string is supposed to serve?
HN also seems to be responding very slowly, and in a couple of cases timing out on the request. It may be under a heavy load.
IMO there is likely huge demand for bots that are witty and can write occasional put a useful comment with a link every now and then.
It’s going to be interesting how spam evolves. At-least spammers who aren’t lazy.
Already many of the recruiting emails I get sound a lot human. They are bots though since they send at 9am everyday
I thought the same thing! Very interesting. I wonder if this is happening on other sites like X/Reddit.
Brave of this guy to link his Twitter. Quick way to get blackballed from every startup in the country.
Are you lonely and want to do something? Flag those spam comments.
Yeah, I was surprised by the amount, it feels like an attack rather than spam.
I hope this didn't interrupt Dang from something more important.
Reminds me of when I was working for a university in early 2000s. I set up WebBB for a student organization to use and after checking back a week later it was thousands of spam posts.
Thoughts and Prayers with Dang during this attack !
Should’ve used the AI to write better comments
Site is effectively getting ddos’d right now
Yep, guess the admins will have a busy day. Seems 10000s of accounts being created and used to spam ai sex bots.
They're back. At this point it might be worthwhile switching off new account registrations for a while?
Still going on btw. We're getting fresh hot new spams as I write this. Diff link in the text.
What we need now is the bot to post here and demonstrate a total lack of sense of irony.
Gives new meaning to "show hn"
They seem to also be spamming posts.
> Is it just me
No, 1000s of bot accounts commenting 30+ per minute are quite obvious
> Is it some kind of coordinated flood attack?
Looks like it
> And is an AI girlfriend really a feasible idea?
It's the new penis enlargement and viagra spam
This is a old, very effective move from the spammer's playbook.
If some entity protests effectively (penetrates the spammer's own anti-spam, anti-communication precautions), threaten to spam them harder. Then follow through. We're seeing some follow through, I reckon.
Yeah this thread is full of spam.
Is the GNAA alive and well???
Yeah, nobody here is going to go for that
So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots