Warning Warning Warning

setishock

Wizard of Wires
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SERIOUSLY PAY ATTENTION

There is a spammer group posting asking for links to certain software. Here's the skivey on it.

Forum admins are today being warned of a new wave of spam coming to forums.

It comes after Russian hackers developed a script to auto submit spam posts to a wide range of forum software - and released it onto the open markets.

The script is able to post to forums even when email validation is required - a common anti-spam tactic used by forum admins.

Targeted forum software claimed open to attack includes vbulletin, phpbb, Invision Power Board, PHP-Nuke, yaBB, IconBoard, UltimateBB, exBB, phorum.org, wiki, different types of bulletin boards and even custom-written code.

Forum admins are advised to follow basic anti-spam procedures, and ensure they have common Russian email addresses blocked, such as mail.ru, inbox.ru, cashette.com, and gawab.com.

For those tempted to use high volume forum spamming, it needs emphasising that forum spam rarely lasts more than a few minutes on valuable forums, and the returns are likely miminal.

However, damage to reputation and standing could be considerable, and may additionally subject the user to legal proceedings under the Computer Misuse Act.

Be careful what you respond to. You could inadvertently do serious harm to this forum and others you are members at.
THINK before you post. The style is to come in, post once or twice, and ask if any one knows where to get such and such software. When you post a link you are doing the spamming for them. Being the source of the spam can get your forum in some serious crapola when the search engine companies.
I guess a good responce would be the old favorite: Google is your friend.
 
Can confirms a bunch of cases of this with drupal based websites as well. I run one and we received a 100 or so registrations and email verifications from spammers till we installed captcha
 
Am I missing something here but when you post a link responding, how are you helping the spammer?
 
Am I missing something here but when you post a link responding, how are you helping the spammer?

If it's a link to something illegal, or to their own product, it gets indexed by google, improving their rankings. If it's something illegal, google might kill your ranking, legal action could be taken, etc.
 
If it's a link to something illegal, or to their own product, it gets indexed by google, improving their rankings. If it's something illegal, google might kill your ranking, legal action could be taken, etc.
That's easy to avoid here. We don't allow links to illegal downloads or pirated software. ;)
 
It can read recaptcha and respond to email verification as well. It's a nasty peice of software.
David, Tom I'll PM you the link to the articule and the software.
 
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