Wow that is one serious spam bot in the Campaign Updates forum, like 68 individual posts filled with random words with webpage links. Guess the 'improved' security that makes me have to log in every time just to post isn't doing so hot.

Cleaning it up now...

Done. 86 messages deleted.

Who left the door open and let the bot in here??

Spambot sound like a new villian!!

Because I didn't get to see any of the posts, can anyone describe the type of content/links in the post, and what user name was posting that stuff?

It could be that someone's account got hacked, though that's unlikely. It could also be a spambot that is able to legitimately log in and solve the antispam tests. It could even be that a blackhat SEO company hired a bunch of "mechanical turks" at $1.00 per hour to manually log in and create posts with backlinks to different products/web pages.

I can't know without having some more details, though, so if anyone can provide me some information in that regard, it would be very helpful.

Thanks! And of course I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

I should have left one intact. They were all the same message, but it was so full of junk that I didn't really think to commit anything to memory.

Kevin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Because I didn't get to see any of the posts, can
> anyone describe the type of content/links in the
> post, and what user name was posting that stuff?
>
> It could be that someone's account got hacked,
> though that's unlikely. It could also be a spambot
> that is able to legitimately log in and solve the
> antispam tests. It could even be that a blackhat
> SEO company hired a bunch of "mechanical turks" at
> $1.00 per hour to manually log in and create posts
> with backlinks to different products/web pages.
>
> I can't know without having some more details,
> though, so if anyone can provide me some
> information in that regard, it would be very
> helpful.
>
> Thanks! And of course I'm very sorry for the
> inconvenience.

The most I remember is that the name was three letters (all consonants I think) and the body of test was probably several pages at least of words that had hyper-links associated with small (two to four word) blocks of text to a wide range of web pages that while I never looked were either for sites like Nike or were virus sites using URL that were similar to but not actual official sites for the products in question.

I don't remember ever seeing the name before and don't remember it having more posts to it than the hyper-link posts.

I think, not certain but think that the user's ID of the spambot was 'mlp'