Forum spam warning

[brian]

It's come to our attention that Russian spammers have found how to auto-post to forums, even when email validation is required (XRUMER program spam).

More than that, the script involved in doing this is now being sold on the open market at botmaster.net.

Previously, Russian spammers could be more easily blocked from spamming forums by the domain they used: cashette.com, mail.ru, inbox.ru, and gawab.com as particular offenders.

This means that blocking of known Russian spam email addresses could help minimise large scale forum spam.

However, if this script finds itself being commonly used by a larger number of webmasters around the globe, it could result not simply in a huge explosion of spam - but also make if very difficult for forum admins to close off offending emails fast enough.

According to the script specifications, it can be used against "phpBB and PHP-Nuke with any modifications, yaBB, VBulletin, Invision Power Board, IconBoard, UltimateBB, exBB, phorum.org, wiki, different types of bulletin boards and even custom-written code."

With this in mind, we've already urged vbulletin.com to review it's registration process to block this, and recommend users of forum platforms in general warn their developers in order to proactively address the issue of blocking automated forum spam.

In the meantime, feel free to reference How to fight forum spam (How to fight forum spamming) for common anti-spam tips for forums, with specialist information on protecting vbulletins.

[dclacroix]

I doubt it will betray itself as a bot in the "User Agent" field, so we probably can't .htaccess it out. However, I look forward to slowing it down a bit because the largest forum I admin requires manual approval. It can try all it wants to login before we approve. I suppose the immediate and repeated attempts will betray it, along with the proxied IP's when we verify.

[kelkat]

Do people just not have enough going on in their lives? I don't understand why anyone would want to spam. What do they get out of it?

I would think manual approval would make any forum a little cleaner - although I'm sure it takes up quite a bit of your time.

[Slashmire]

hmm I guess that spamming is fast free, and a 1% revenue would help them...sad state of work though..

[kelkat]

Exactly how does one make money from spam? I mean other than conning people out of their money that is.

[Slashmire]

Well that exactly, if I spam 500 messages with the topic "buy gold from me for only $50" and 50,000 people read it, and a single person actually send $50...then I made a bit of money.

[brian]

Indeed, I'm watching this very carefully, delacroix.

[dclacroix]

Originally Posted by brian

Indeed, I'm watching this very carefully, delacroix.

I've been seeing some rather obvious bot registrations on boards, but I have yet to see any sort of fingerprint that lets me know anything about the bot.

However, I've also been watching how Google has been handling things. At first, there were an overwhelming amount of the introductory spam run by the creators:

I'm seeking for overview of XRUMER program. Can you help me? Or give me a link to the official site with this program. Thank you!

The run included no links at all. The strategy was to get a member of the targeted board to be helpful and post a link. This would increase their "sites linking in" count.

Over the past few days, the number of those listed by Google has dropped considerably. Since I have little optimism that all the posts were cleaned up on boards, I think Google might have begun to filter them out.