bound2burst.net

In case it is not immediately obvious, do not click the links or the pictures. At best this is just weird ad spam - I checked out that bobobogooglebobobo thing and it seems to have been spread across more than this website - but there's a decent chance there is virus/spyware involved here - clicking the link or bottom photo (which is a link) will cause your browser to begin downloading a small file without authorisation. Unsure what the file is - it is just called "download" - but it is fairly obvious that it is bad news.

Is this spam?

Aha, the answer comes before I finished typing. Fortunately, on a Mac nothing is downloaded unless I approve of the file and .exe files dont run on a Mac anyway - so I can click the links as much as I like but I just get a 'not found' message.

At the very least. It's been posted on a host of various sites (a quick Google check of "bobobogooglebobobo" shows that), each with a different topic title, but still the same design - three sets of three numbers. This is probably a bot - Dave, can you up the security on this forum? Email validation and so on?

Yes, a google search for bobobogooglebobobo.net shows 10400 results at the moment, so it looks as if the bot is slowly trawling through all the web forums it can find and adding a similar thread to each one.

Thanks for being vigilant guys. I will delete anything else of this nature that I see posted here. The advice is sound: don't click on any links posted here for the moment. If necessary, I will switch the board to a mode where I need to approve messages before they are posted; that way I'll filter out the crap.

Tightening the basic user and registration settings would hopefully do the job rather than that; requiring users to validate their accounts via email and disabling guest viewing/posting privileges are pretty easy ways of filtering out the vast majority of simple bots that are out there.

Can I assume that this person is now banned??

I have banned about 60 bots so far but there will always be more. If anything looks odd about a message and it contains a link, don't click on it, any more than you would if it were in your e-mail.

I find it really amazing, the lengths that some folk will go to just to get a virus or some other bug on other people's computer system. Have they really nothing better to do with their time? Or am I missing an obvious point here? Is there some kind of underground movement to bring down global systems, because this seems to be a very strange way of going about it.