Between all the sweet spammer deals and the Russian lady adds... my pocketbook is doomed. I'm gonna have me a hot Russian single lady and a 32gig unlocked iPhone though and I will be poop'n in tall cotton. YOu'll all be jealous when my hot single Russian lady is spotting for me on the line while I talk on my new 32gig iPhone.

I think we're down to one very determined spambot... So... SPAM FREE FOR OVER 9 MINUTES!

In my inbox this morning...

A spammer tried to register, but was stopped from doing so.

Bot Name: <none>
Bot Email: <none>
IP Address: 31.184.238.145

buwhahahaha....

Ok, I've had 5 more in the last hour...

How about respamming back at the a$$holes!

Those who run the automated forum spamming programs like that don't have forums of their own. They are most often either selling fake goods or are trying to get people to try to purchase items so that they can use their personal and payment information for identify theft. They are usually well known and from either China or eastern Europe. For instance, that IP address that Mike posted below, 31.184.238.145, is used by a known forum spammer out of Moscow in Russia. There are organizations that keep databases of these known forum spamming IP addresses and provide APIs (application program interfaces) that some forum software can use to verify whether a new user signup is likely a "spambot" or not.

This is the same sort of problem that spam email presented many years ago and has, somewhat, been dealt with. There are groups like Spamhaus that keep databases of known sources of spam emails, and mail server administrators just set up their mail servers to update a local copy of that database periodically. Anytime a connection from another mail server starts up, the local mail server checks the remote mail server's IP address agains the blacklist. If it's there, the connection gets dropped. If it's not, the transaction proceeds. In that case also, the best thing to do is just make it too much work for the sender to try to get into your corner of the Internet. Trying to attack back not only might make a person, who is ethically lacking in the first place, take notice enough to direct a much harsher attack, it also can very easily get the vengeful forum admin in hot water with U.S. law enforcement, that doesn't tend to look past such things as much as law enforcement from some other countries.

Well folks, we average 120 spammer attempts per day... I feel so honored...

Wow, I had no idea that our little forum was so popular..

Yea, you guys must have bought a lot of their goods!

They're baaaaaaccckk.

Maybe the forum should be changed so that every time we make a post we have to answer a question, like they do over at 6mmbr.

Well, you gotta admire their persistence... my kids could learn a thing or two...

We spoke to soon.... Their back again this AM....

Yea... like roaches...