Interesting forum spam.

[JohnC]

I got this message posted to a forum spam trap.

Title: "This forum moderated by human?"

Hi, I collect unmoderated base of forums. I do not wish to create problems. I respect work of moderators.
Please if this forum moderated by human , remove this topic and I shall remove you from the base. Thanks

Spammer:

Code: [Select]

User: TestbotforumKZ
Email: testforum@bonbon.net
IP: 195.2.114.1

Looks as though the person spamming is trying to give forums a way of opting out of spam, much like a removal link or unsubscription address in email spam. The bot had the domain gooorooogle.com as its website address in the profile. And it appears someone registered that domain. And has now setup blog to monitor future activities of this bot http://gooorooogle.com/

[Drusepth]

It's interesting indeed.  Much like one of the comments on the first article, this could be gathering information on how many moderators there are, how long it takes them to remove spam, and how often they get on, etc.  Information like this would be handy to have if you were planning on launching massive spam attacks and wanted to know the perfect time to do it..

It'd be interesting to find out what information it actually is gathering from these thousands of forums.

[JohnC]

First thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of forums this bot has posted on where people are replying to it instead of deleting the message, a couple of examples:

http://forum.familyguy.com/showthread.php?p=356210
http://www.pandemicstudios.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6891

I have noticed that the bot has been around a second time on forums that left the message in place. It replied to the thread with "test post". If the thread was removed it doesn't post again it looks like. I'm curious what happens when it finds a forum with the thread but it is locked like the thread in the second link above. I wonder if the programmer of the bot anticipated this and treats it like as if the thread was removed. Or if perhaps it tries to reply and fails.

I took another look at gooorooogle.com, looks like that blog has received some comment spam. One person even enquired about purchasing the spam bot *tsk tsk*. One person recommended upgrading PHPBB forums to PHPBB BB3, which should stop spam.