If you see a message from Cameo suggesting you are a robot…
We’ve seen an increasing number of malicious probes attacking Cameo recently. A probe is a robot that tries to access files in common locations that have known security vulnerabilities. Cameo will almost always redirect these to the log-in page, as the intruder simply isn’t logged in.
The main problem for us is not so much the vulnerabilities a probe is looking for, but the load these constant probes put on the server and the bandwidth they consume. This particularly applies when they don’t pause between requests. Many do, partly to try to escape notice, and these are not so much a problem. But when bogus requests flood the server for minutes or hours at a time, it starts to look like a denial-of-service attack.
Cameo’s forms have had a security check for this kind of behaviour for a while. I’ve now added a security check on the main log-in page to detect whether access is by a robot. If Cameo thinks it is a robot, it will block its IP address to prevent further access. Generally, that will get rid of the intruder with less impact, and also persuade a robot to give up sooner.
Allow-list
The IP address of anyone who successfully logs in to is automatically added to an allow-list, so they cannot trigger a false-positive from that address.
I hope you won’t notice any of this. However, if you get a message suggesting you might be a robot, a false positive, Cameo will lock you out. If that happens, please make contact so we can add you to the allow-list of addresses that never get blocked and better tune the detection algorithm.