The nuts and bolts of a forum spam automator

Abstract

Web boards, blogs, wikis, and guestbooks are forums frequented and contributed to by many Web users. Unfortunately, the utility of these forums is being diminished due to spamming, where miscreants post messages and links not intended to contribute to forums, but to advertise their websites. Many such links are malicious. In this paper we investigate and compare automated tools used to spam forums. We analyze the functionality of the most popular forum spam automator, XRumer, in details and find that it can intelligently get around many practices used by forums to distinguish humans from bots, all while keeping the spammer hidden. Insights gained from our study suggest specific measures that can be used to block spamming by this automator. 1