persistent bot email fake subscribers w/ malicious addresses

  • Unknown's avatar
    ktz2 · Member ·

    In the past month I’ve had 2 malicious bots fake-subscribing to my blog for email notifications, approx 25 times ! The worst one : jackrussellterrier23, the other one : Kucia Kodes. These fake ‘subscribers’ have no presence on WP other than attempting email harvesting by way of new post email notifications.

    So I delete them as subscribers, but soon they do it again, in a day or 2, or even later the same day, I’ve lost count of how many times!
    Apparently all I can do is delete these nefarious fakes from my subscriber list, which I do almost every day ! Each of these had an email address of (Name).proton-dot-me.

    However, yesterday the jackrussellterrier23 had a new address of jackrussellterrier23-dot-info , given when fake-subscribing. Turns out that address is blocked by Malwarebytes as MALICIOUS.
    Please please – can’t something be done to permanently block these evil fake-subscriber bots on WordPress ?? I can not be the only one here with this problem.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    staartmees · Member ·

    Those fake subscribers aren’t a security problem for your site or the wordpress.com platform. Nor can they harvest email addresses through new post notifications.

    There is no real way to block someone. Best solution is to simply ignore them.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ktz2 · Member ·

    Thanks for responding.
    But why then, are these bots so hell-bent on being subscribers, what is the goal for them? because somebody behind these bad actors actively wants them attached to my site ( and others, I assume) for some reason, or they wouldn’t keep coming back repeatedly to subscribe after being denied.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @ktz2, just catching this. My best guess is that this type of spammer is just trying to get you to look at their site. I’d encourage you to ignore them and the system will catch them, as it seems to have done here. If you continue having trouble with them, let us know.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ktz2 · Member ·

     Thanks for responding. 
     Happily it seems these 2 bots have at last lost interest in me, but only 4 days ago. 
     The ‘jackrussellterrier23’ was the worst,  coming at me over & over & over – on one day it was 5 times with 3 of those in 1 hour !  I’m serious when I say he / it came at me  over 40 times in approx 3 weeks.   I do recognize the 2 bots names  as senders of one-time spam,  but that was before the constant  fake-subscription attempts began. 

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