On February 15th, newly-created Fediverse accounts started posting spam messages from various instances, sending invites to a Discord server for a Japanese troll organization. This spam was widespread across the Fediverse. The posts frame ap12 from “KuronekoServer” as the culprit behind the operation.  Looking at their spam content (in Japanese)

A really interesting look at the recent spam wave.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    I think integrating with SpamAssasin shouldn’t be that hard. The threshold may need to be set quite high and things like votes/boosts may need to be exempted in some way, but the Fediverse can take a lot of existing tools from email.

    Luckily, we don’t need to do anything to support anything like DKIM and reverse PTR, because those technologies are built right into ActivityPub. We can’t add SPF, because ActivityPub allows for arbitrary servers to boost stuff so that replies and such get mirrored right. A DMARC-like “we’ve blocked 40% of your traffic” notification may also be useful so Fediverse servers can monitor if their servers are misbehaving.

    What we might need is some kind of ActivityPub proxy that’ll parse and analyse incoming/outgoing traffic, pass them through whatever spam filter you like, and forward the ones that make it to actual server software. That way, we can write one tool that’ll work for Lemmy, Mastodon, Misskey, and all other kinds of servers.