My forum was attacked by someone posting garbage

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My forum was attacked by someone posting garbage

Forum attacked with garbage, not spam

jason1989

9:39 pm on May 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've had people spam my anonymous (registration not required) forum before, adding links to other sites. But yesterday, somebody started posting garbage to my site, automatically and non-stop.

There were bogus links with random strings of text (no words) and randomly generated hyperlinks to bogus domain names like asdfkasdkf dot com, etc.

Since each post was simply valueless random junk I wonder if somebody was trying to ruin my forum?

Thank you and please advise.

P.S. Fortunately, flood protection helped (each IP has to wait 1 minute before next post) but each incoming message was sent from a different IP, which I blocked as soon as they'd come in (blocked over 100 IP addresses). The attacker must have exhausted his list of proxies because posts slowed down to a complete halt after adding the last one.

Status_203

8:11 am on May 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

It might not just be valueless random junk, it might be unique valueless random junk - in which case when it shows up in the search engines they know which form submission worked.

Or, could be just going for the links while trying to avoid bad word filters.

jason1989

4:48 pm on May 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

it did appear to be unique strings of text, subject and content. Please note that the links were bogus, such as adkfjekse dot com and random as well.

As it was happening, I thought that the objective was to trash my forum since they were bombarding with constant posts.

This was my first experience with something like this. In the past, spammers try to impersonate real visitors, sneaking in normal posts with links to their sites or periodic automated canned posts with links.

HRoth

5:59 pm on May 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

People do this on blogs all the time, and yes, it comes from a bunch of different ip addresses, one right after the other. It might not have been your flood control that slowed it down, because IME, the posts come about 2-3 minutes apart. I have had 150 come through at once, all just random strings to bogus links. It is just someone's way of finding where they can post spam. It isn't nefarious.