mass signups
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last Thursday morning, 2/22, around 9.12am Central Standard time, I received over 3000 emails about how i’d signed up for over 3000 different wordpress blogs. username, password, click here to confirm. i can assure you that i was not responsible for those signups. several more signup emails have trickled in during the days since that initial Thursday deluge. i didn’t click any of the confirmation links, so hopefully this is just an annoyance of receiving spam emails. while i realize this is not a wordpress.com issue per se, i wanted to bring it to somebody’s attention. i couldn’t find anywhere to report this, so i thought i’d put in here. if any staff are reading this, the email address that was signed up for those 3000 blogs is the same one as the account i’m using to post this. all of the emails came through a ‘serverconfig.com’ smtp server.
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Hi,
I’ve added a tag to the sidebar at right to call for staff attention. Staff may respond here, at your email address, or at both locations.
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Hi johnpcurtiss,
hopefully this is just an annoyance of receiving spam emails. while i realize this is not a wordpress.com issue per se, i wanted to bring it to somebody’s attention.
I’ve checked our system and the emails you have received were not sent by us, so I’m afraid we are unable to block them for you. They sound like auto generated emails sent by spam bots so it’s best to mark them as spam rather than just deleting them — this will train your spam filter to remove them from your inbox going forward.
Thanks.
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Hi I have just received 6 email followers this morning with different names but addresses at outlook.com which seems suspicious to me. Should I be concerned?
Sylvia -
These bogus bog-follows (all from @outlook.com email addresses) are happening to me and others too – there is another thread on this here More weird likes/ follows
But what I’m wondering is if @johnpcurtiss is somehow unknowingly the source of all those ‘spam’ follows???? could he be hacked somehow and fronting all those bogus blog-subscriptions? The timing seems more than coincidental!
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The two issues are not related. The original issue was for people signing johnpcurtiss up for WordPress.org type sites on other hosts. This means that spammers got his address from the internet and used it for spammy things.
The following from spammy accounts issue is related to the link in @ingridcc’s reply. No connection between the two.
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Hi everyone,
We’ve received a few reports of spam followers from Outlook email addresses and I’ll be sharing updates here: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/more-weird-likesfollows?replies=9. As @darciemg mentioned, the original question in this thread is a different issue.
I’m closing this thread but you are welcome to reply in the one I linked to above.
@karadie — we are looking into these spam followers at the moment. You are receiving notifications of email followers but they do not have access to your account or site.
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Maybe it’s not a different issue. I was signed up for 3000 different WordPress blogs, but each of those blog owners would have only seen one new sign ip, and not noticed anything strange about that.
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@johnpcurtiss – probably not, if the WP happiness engineers/ tech crew don’t think so. (But do you happen to have an outlook.com email address???)
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Yes, I do. Technically it’s a hotmail.com address, but Outlook.com is just hotmail.com re-branded. It’s the same freemail service. I have @Outlook.com “aliases” and I go to https://Outlook.com to get my webmail.
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Your issue is definitely unrelated, and is a completely different type of spam attack. What’s happening to you is that someone is using your email address to sign up for user accounts on random self-hosted WordPress sites that haven’t disabled that setting, likely in an attempt to crash or gain access to those sites by flooding them with requests like this using email addresses randomly harvested or bought on the web.
As those sites are not in our control we have no way to prevent that, and your best option is to set up a filter in your email account to automatically delete those as you get them.
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