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Abandoned message boards

   

All morning, we've been getting spam from the Ukrainian porn trackback spammers, mostly with links to a certain sort of message boards: WWWBoard, which is one of a collection of scripts originally written by Matt Wright (yes, that Matt Wright who wrote the infamous and often abused FormMail script).

Matt's scripts are now supported by a SourceForge project, but old versions are still widely used. Case in point: The above-mentioned WWWBoard script.

It seems like our "friends" here have picked lots of abandoned WWWBoard scripts from all over the web, spammed them to death and are now sending out trackback spam pointing to those boards. When you follow such a link, you are redirected elsewhere, e.g. to subdomains at atspace.com (who seem to have taken those sites down already - kudos to them!).

I've been sending emails to the owners of those abandoned sites all morning, but don't really expect any replies. But to anyone out there running a website:

  • When you abandon your site, please take it down entirely or at least disable the "interactive" parts like message boards or guestbooks.
  • Avoid Matt's script (and their successors from the nms project) like the plague. Choose something else instead, preferrably something with spam protection and the ability to block posters and IP addresses.
  • If you're still running any of Matt's or the nms project's scripts, please at least update them to their latest version.

The trackback spam itself is coming from the usual IP ranges: 85.255.113.* and 85.255.114.*, so if you haven't done so already, I'd strongly recommend you block those. I've also send another note to the owner of that IP range (inhoster.com), but don't really expect a reply, despite the note on their site saying that they follow up on all abuse reports. After all, this has been going on for months now ...

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Here's what others have to say about 'Abandoned message boards':

wwwboard massive trampolization from Sergey S. Kostyliov
The rule is - if there is an old unpatched (but still working) code on an old resourse that allows third peoples to add content, and there is nobody looks at it as administrator - it will be trampolinized. [read more]
Tracked on Friday, December 30 2005 @ 11:59 CET

Damn Spam! - Spam using .edu domains
Tracked on Saturday, May 19 2007 @ 17:52 CEST

Damn Spam! - Using the W3C for spam
Tracked on Saturday, February 16 2008 @ 11:31 CET

Abandoned message boards | 4 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Abandoned message boards

More trackback spam for abandoned message boards (wwwboard, again) today. And those posts still redirect to that terminated subdomain at atspace.com. Talk about a complete waste of time and resources ...

Authored by: Dirk on Friday, December 30 2005 @ 12:03 CET
Thanks much!
Hello

Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!


Bye







Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 12 2007 @ 09:09 CEST
Thanks much!
Hello

Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!


Bye







Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 13 2007 @ 04:20 CEST
Yeah, whatever

Of course, both of the above comments are test posts by spammers. I only leave them up for educational purposes.

Authored by: Dirk on Sunday, July 15 2007 @ 20:44 CEST

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