Errors during registration? Never seen these before.

[pulgoki]

With the sudden influx of spam attempts on the forum, I've tried a few things to combat it.  Most were simple things like changing security questions (which finally solved the problem). I also tried to install the 'stop the spam' addon. 

I'm not sure if that addon is what started causing the error.  We've never seen this error before.  Even after disabling the addon, the errors continue but are far and few between now.

I've tried to register a new account myself to see if I could replicate the error but can't seem to figure it out.


Here is the error, and it always comes from the same range of ip addresses. 52.230.152.*

Guest
52.230.152.226
7792dccf906e00bbd74ced6695ca2cba
***************/forum/index.php?action=verificationcode;vid=search;rand=9a0afc285dcaa6a9bccd748e21b862ab;sound
*************/public_html/forum/Sources/Register.php (Line 838)
Backtrace information

Type of error: Undefined
Error message Select
2: Undefined array key "code"
6
Today at 02:50 PM
Guest
52.230.152.226
7792dccf906e00bbd74ced6695ca2cba
*****************/forum/index.php?action=verificationcode;rand=66ef0a683a4722014d2cd4079cd57688;vid=search;format=.wav;sound
****************/public_html/forum/Sources/Register.php (Line 838)
Backtrace information

Type of error: Undefined
Error message Select
2: Undefined array key "code"
5
Today at 02:50 PM
Guest
52.230.152.226
7792dccf906e00bbd74ced6695ca2cba

Sorry if posting those IP's aren't allowed?  I'm not sure if they are needed to help troubleshoot the error?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

If I had to guess, there's no actual problem to troubleshoot - I think you are seeing the errors because someone is trying to skip steps in the registration process, but since it's erroring out it's probably not working for them.

The IP is oddly enough (again) a Microsoft owned IP NetRange: 52.224.0.0 - 52.255.255.255, and this is not the first time Microsoft has come up recently. This could be someone abusing some Microsoft service, like an AI, or this could be some Microsoft crawler gone haywire.

[pulgoki]

Ok, that makes sense.

We were getting hammered pretty bad for about a week. It makes sense that they would be using Ai to get past the security questions.  I had to make up some questions very specific to the site and that worked.  Hopefully it doesn't cause someone not to be able to register.

[pulgoki]

Here is a question born out of ignorance. Would it be a bad idea to block that range of ip addresses? 

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Can't really say for sure, I don't know everything that is actually in that range - but I would guess you probably won't lose any real users over it if you do.

[pulgoki]

Once again, thanks for the help. 

[Kindred]

If you do block it, use htaccess, not smf's ban system...

And, general recommendation is to block by user-agent, not ip