Joomla Site: K2 comment spam

[alpl]

I run two Joomla Websites on x10 free hosting. I my opinion x10 free hosting is great and I have been a big fan of the good services x10 provides. Recently my account was suspended because of high resource utilization. I initially thought that it could have been because I had not updated Joomla and the PHP on the hosting was also upgraded.

I filed an appeal for unsuspension and I was asked to check for issues in plugins etc. When unsuspended I put the Joomla offline but the resource utilization was still 40% - 60% etc. I tried to download Joomla file backup which I could download successfully however I could not download the mysql database export from phpMyAdmin, it went on running and running finally the download failing. I had an old local backup of my Joomla site so, I started using that backup for troubleshooting the issue.

In the meantime my site was suspended again and this time there was a mention of the site utilizing MySQL heavily, which did not make sense at all. I filed an appeal and this time to avoid HRU the site was put in public_html_hru folder.

Today I checked my mysql database and finally tried to export it however I was amazed to see the export download going over 100 Mb. I cancelled the download and ran the query

SELECT table_name AS"Tables", round(((data_length + index_length)/1024/1024),2)"Size in MB"FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE table_schema ="$DB_NAME"ORDERBY(data_length + index_length)DESC;

The K2_comments table is around 1 GB :-o or more than a million rows.
I think I have been spammed so much without I knowing it, The funny thing is I don't even use K2 its just installed and sitting there uselessly.

I have truncated the table however I don't know if running queries etc on a 1 Gb+ database can once again get me get me suspended? I just want to download the mysql backup so that I can fix this spam issue.

The site has been suspended twice already I do not want to run in to the issue of getting suspended the third and last time while fixing this.

 

[chatngox]

If you have installed too much plugins then you have to disable some.
You should really check the comment system, apply spam protection or use disqus or lifefire or just disable it.
That used to be happening to me. I installed spam protection and only allows logged in user to comment and require approval etc.

If that not the case, then I don't know... Staffs could assist you then.

 

[alpl]

I have uninstalled all useless plugins including K2, disabled user registration etc.

 

[chatngox]

okay, from what I know when yo uninstall stuff through acp or any control panel, they don't usually remove database tables, so you need to remove it yourself.

Drop those tables.

 

[alpl]

I did that, for some plugins they stay, for some they are dropped automatically.

 

[alpl]

How do I know the health of my account. The issue was with spam, I have removed all of the unnecessary stuff and put captchas etc. I cannot test if a bot is still trying, sending post data or get requests etc on my local system.

The CPU usage is ~0Mb/100Mb. (It was over ~40 to 100 earlier)
The Memory usage is ~20Gb/1Tb
Entry Processes is ~2/20

Is this good statistics?

 

[chatngox]

Yeah, so far so good...
cpanel has a latest visitor feature... if you're unsure who is visiting, you can check upon that.

 

[stgeorge]

You cannot test comments on x10hosting as you will not be notified when comments are posted as the mail system constantly fails. That is why you did not know that people were posting comments and the database filled up.