What’s the deal with the every few days spammer?

[Smackpixi]

Sorry if this is already known and addressed. I don’t understand the point of the bot that shows up every so often and creates an account and drops a bunch of Chinese stuff With university names mixed in. It’s a bot so maybe there is no motivation, but Bots have owners, and they have motivations. Just testing the forum’s bot controll? does it also try to make purchases? What’s it’s deal?

 

[Guest 7034872]

I've only ever seen it spam the forum by creating bogus threads (like it's doing right now). My guess is that if the forum showed evidence of special vulnerabilities, it'd exploit them.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

My guess is that someone thinks this site is affiliated with a Japanese recruitment site called enworld.com :

外資系企業の転職・求人エージェント｜エンワールド・ジャパン - よくあるご質問

 

[Smackpixi]

Are those japonese characters then?

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Are those japonese characters then?

Nah, it's Chinese. My wife (native speaker) says they are offers for fake credentials.

 

[Guest 7034872]

That's a really good catch on the likely connection with enworld.com: I suspect Twiggly has this right.

 

[Rabulias]

I thought you needed to have a certain number of posts before you could post links? Is there an exploit or bug in Xenforo they are taking advantage of?

 

[Maxperson]

Sorry if this is already known and addressed. I don’t understand the point of the bot that shows up every so often and creates an account and drops a bunch of Chinese stuff With university names mixed in. It’s a bot so maybe there is no motivation, but Bots have owners, and they have motivations. Just testing the forum’s bot controll? does it also try to make purchases? What’s it’s deal?

It's every night at about the same time.

 

[Guest 7034872]

I thought you needed to have a certain number of posts before you could post links? Is there an exploit or bug in Xenforo they are taking advantage of?

I think the same spammer often posts threads that look like moves in the Battleship game ("d3"). That might be a way of circumventing any post count requirements.

 

[Guest 7034872]

Whatever Morrus, the mods, and/or the software company did, I haven't seen any Hanzi-written offers for fake diplomas in quite a while. Hat-tip to whoever fixed it.