[Coco] ** Forum spammer is among us **

[Roger Taylor]

A recent spammer appears to be coming from 24.236.128.77 and nearby 
addresses.  24.236 was the prefix to 2 spam IPs.  Either that or some 
original valid member posts from the same IP address was injected 
with the spam, causing the original honest IP address to still appear.

I believe that the person at 24.236.x.x may be an honest CoCo user 
who has an infected computer that is running some kind of session 
hijacker.  This user has also browsed through the CoCo gallery and 
main website looking at specific CoCo files.

He also came to the site from a Google search for "make dsk in 
windows", meaning he is a CoCo emulator user.  This person has also 
visited www.sclaudia.net which is a CoCo website.  How do I know 
this?  Because that website tries to link directly to my CoCo logo 
which produces a Hot Link error on my server, showing up in my logs 
what IP tried to view a site picture without being on my site.  The 
spammer at the above IP address was linked to the Hot Link activity 
which means he was on the sclaudia.net CoCo site.

Everyone who visits the forums needs to scan their computer for virus 
and spyware in case there is software running that knows how to post 
in forums using their current session ID.  A great deal is possible 
from spammer tools, and it's common for someone's computer to be 
compromised to send out e-mails and HTTP posts without the user knowing it.

Please know that I do not review any website IP activity unless we 
have a serious problem like this, in which I will take a known IP 
address from an attack or spam post, then I will trace it in the huge 
server log file looking for answers.  Your privacy is always 
respected on CoCo3.com, and everything that you want to be anonymous 
will stay that way.  Nothing else is recorded or used to advertise to you, etc.

Clean Your Computers before visiting the CoCo Forums.

-- 
Roger Taylor