One Man's Fight Against Forum Spam

JWSmythe writes "Free Internet Press has an interview with 'Random Digilante,' an anonymous hacker who has been taking over forum spammers' email accounts, and notifying forum operators to delete those accounts. It looks like his reasoning is sound, and his methods are safe, where he won't hurt any real users."

Comments

Re:Illegal

[clone53421]

He’s thought of that already, and seems to have his case made. RTFA.

RD: If I were taking over an account that was created by a human being who actually cared to contribute to my forums, yes that would be illegal.

FIP: Are you concerned about the possible legal consequences of your actions?

RD: Here is the reasoning I use, and I know that a lot of people argue it.
Especially now that I have a few dedicated forums whose only reason for existing is that they capture the login credentials of forum spammers, my feeling is that they're not people, they're robots. Xrumer [a forum spamming software] is a 100% automated process. The human has to set up the email address where the responses get sent for things like confirming your account by clicking on a link, but everything after that is done by the software. No human being is harmed by what I do, only a piece of software. If they cared, they would pay attention to the fact that these accounts are getting taken over very regularly by me. They don't. They just set up new accounts and start over.

It's hard to feel "bad" about taking these accounts over. All I can tell you is that I have never taken over any account that was not very obviously being solely used repeatedly to auto-register to forums. In fact by the time I get to them it's obvious that the spammer only set them up from 1 - 6 days prior to me taking it over. There are no human-written messages in any of these accounts. I certainly would not have gone so public with this activity if there had been. Only purely automated messaging has ever been present in any of these, and I have enough hard data to back that up.

Basically he claims that since a robot registered the e-mail accounts, you aren’t infringing on any person’s rights.

I doubt that it’d fly, actually, but who knows.

I was banned from Free Republic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I created an account and was banned almost immediately.

They have extremely vigilant forum monitors who will bring the banhammer down for the slightest offense.

My offense? I insinuated that gays might be able to serve in the military just as well as straights.

Example "advanced" spam

[Dan East]

Here's a specific example of what I'm talking about. Here is a post made to my forums in July 2010:

You can choose ‘Micro-ATX’ size motherboard for your HP. That limits the possible range of motherboards deals you will find. My advise is to buy a case that fits full ‘ATX’ form factor motherboards and go from there, many choices. It is depending on money and what you want if your building a good rig for gaming multimedia etc and don't buy a case with power supply. Please choose a separate power supply.

Now here is a post from another website made in 2009:

Your HP case (the cheapest part of the pc!) takes a ‘Micro-ATX’ size motherboard.

That limits the possible range of motherboards\deals you will find. (look for a motherboard\processor package)

Now you are already buying ‘a whole new computer’ except the case, why stop there? (unless you want the small form factor)

My advise (thats why your here!) is to buy a case that fits full ‘ATX’ form factor motherboards and go from there, much more choice.

Depending on money and what you want if your building a good rig for gaming\multimedia etc DON’T buy a case with power supply, they are usually sh*t (cheap\unreliable). Choose a case, choose a separate power supply (after research!)