Hello Kontalkers,
We are currently experiencing an abuse of our phone number verification service through the Kontalk main server - probably by a spammer.
The abuse started a couple of days ago from a single IP address. By putting more strict throttling rules and by blocking the IP we were able to counteract the attack.
However, starting yesterday, the abuser has adapted to change his/her IP address rapidly to workaround our throttling protection mechanism.
Unfortunately, until we find a more effective way to counteract this attack, I had to disable new registrations.
News will come soon through this post and social media accounts. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Development of a countermeasure is under way. Hopefully registrations will be enabled again this weekend.
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The main server has been patched with countermeasures and registrations are enabled again. Although I did some tests on our test server, we shall see what happens in the real world with the real abusers. Since I’m not considering the matter totally closed yet, I’ll keep this topic open for a few days and provider further updates.
I’m sorry to inform you that registrations were disabled again because of another abuse. It seems that the spammer has adapted to our protection mechanism (he/she’s probably targeting us and studying the source code for the server - maybe he/she’s paid by Facebook ).
I’m investigating an even stronger approach - damn, I’ll put a captcha if I need to.
Thanks for your patience.
Registrations are enabled again!
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