Dima Maleev’s startup mentor.sh faced a massive influx of fake accounts created in one hour through the public registration route. Thousands of bots registered on the platform, but were stopped by the email service’s exhausted sending limit.
Dima Maleev’s startup mentor.sh faced a massive influx of fake accounts created in one hour through the public registration route. Thousands of bots registered on the platform, but were stopped by the email service’s exhausted sending limit.
This was stated by mentor.sh co-founder Vlad Kampov.
«Last week, mentor.sh experienced a massive wave of bot-driven fake registrations. Turkish-language spam, phishing URLs in usernames, disposable email addresses — all the usual. It wasn’t fun. But it was a wake-up call,» Kampov wrote.
According to him, the service was attacked by more than 25,000 accounts created in just over an hour. Most of them used disposable email services such as mail7.io. Many of the profiles contained phishing URLs in the username. The attack was likely aimed at boosting SEO or malicious redirects.
«Our registration route was public, and the bots found it. What saved us (oddly enough): We just ran out of Mailtrap’s mailing quota, so no spam was delivered. Amazing protection against failures,» noted the mentor.sh co-founder.
He added that after that, a CAPTCHA from Cloudflare appeared on the platform, disposable domains were blocked, and the speed of suspicious traffic was limited.
«Lesson: bots don’t care how big your platform is — the main thing is that you have an open form. If you create something — protect it from day one,» Vlad Kampov advised.
Mentor.sh noted that eliminating the consequences of such attacks is expensive, because even with automation, checking data integrity takes a lot of time.
«Here’s a story for the night: „How Vlad stopped us from false success“ In any case, the best thing you can get from launching a small startup is to get a partner from whom you can learn :) From this point of view, mentor.sh has already paid off!», — commented on the situation, mentor.sh co-founder Dima Maleev.
As a reminder, mentor.sh launched in April of this year. It is a platform that helps mentors present their services.
