Date: 7/7/25 2:01 pm From: Paul Budde <buddep...> Subject: [mou-net] Yesterday's event on mou-net
Yesterday in the mid-afternoon someone (probably a bot) managed to sign up for the MOU website and then start sending emails repeatedly with little or no content. We lost count after 100. This "bot" also managed to create over 1000 RQDs. They, too, had no content of interest. All the strange phrases you saw in those emails were also in one or more fields of the RQDs.
To address these issues, we
1. turned off the ability to send an email to the listserv from the button in the upper right corner of the MOU home page; 2. added the email address "<mou...>" to the list of moderated emails, meaning this email address cannot send an email to the entire listserv; and 3. deleted the most recently added user to the MOU website (user = "NQSJMUIn") which was almost certainly the source of the problems.
Doing (1) didn't stop the onslaught, but we plan to keep this facility inoperative as that might have enabled the bot to create the user account. Actions (2) and (3) seemed to immediately stop the emails. We'll leave <mou...> moderated until it seems safe to change it -- though with (1) turned off we can't imagine this email account would ever need to send a message to the group. We will also investigate ways to have better control over which user accounts can be created.
The event seems to be past us, as we haven't had any of these emails since yesterday early evening and no new RQDs have been created. We apologize for the annoyance it caused all of you (us).
