Bulletin board spam
14th August 2002
My friend Tim recently received a spam from a company called TrafficBBS, who specialise in bulk submissions to 50,000 search engines and 120,000+ BBS (web based bulletin boards). A quick look at their list of targetted forums reveals that they are spidering and spamming a whole bunch of simple web based forum scripts that don’t require user authentication, such as WWWBoard. This is a form of spam I wasn’t aware of until now. It’s scary to think how easily the system could be expanded to automatically register on more advanced widespread forum systems such as vBulletin.
Incidentally, their crawler (or one of them) identifies itself as PHP/4.2.1
and uses the IP address 211.101.236.142.
More recent articles
- llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM - 26th March 2024
- Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter - 23rd March 2024
- Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests - 22nd March 2024
- Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR - 16th March 2024
- The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken - 8th March 2024
- Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing - 5th March 2024
- Interesting ideas in Observable Framework - 3rd March 2024
- Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR - 27th February 2024
- The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video - 21st February 2024
- Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins - 9th February 2024