I previously said that the Russians are coming. Yes, I meant it.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had registrations from 25 accounts that flagged themselves as bots. Of those, about half went on to post exactly one spammy toot.

Of these, 24 of them had email addresses that were hosted by mxsrv.mailasrvs.pw. That one server itself is hosted by DigitalOcean, an American hosting company. The other email address is from a domain without a designated mailserver (that is, it lacks an MX record).

This updates my last blog post where I said that we’re getting a flood of spambots. Summary: if you’re an admin affected by this, you must act now.

I’ll cut to the chase. It seems that this week’s collection of spammer registrations come from Russia. I think that the spam they’re sending today is a probe to see who will respond to it. My prediction is that instances who don’t act quickly will see those accounts stop posting and drawing attention to themselves. In a few months, say nearing the American mid-term elections, they’ll wake up and start steering the inevitable political conversations in directions that we, the instance admins, had not intended. By that time it will be too late to easily root them out because their numbers will have exploded during the time we were looking the other way and hoping the problem will go away.