Spam Postings - How did they do it?

I've just had six spam messages posted in the forum, all within a couple of miutes of each other by a user called 'unknown'.

I am trying to figure out how these six messages were able to be posted as I have the forum configured that only Registered Users can post messages.

In checking the list of forum users that are reigistered, there is no user with the name of 'unknown'.

David Watkins

Forest of Dean Family History
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/

Hi David,

the only way I can imagine is that it was a registered user who was deleted in the meantime. Are there other admins apart from you?

Alex

I am the only one with admin privileges and there is one other person who has only Moderator privileges.

I was online when the spam messages were posted so I picked them them up very soon after they were posted. No users were deleted from the forum by me this day.

Additional information which I did not mention in my previous posting above is that another spam message was posted shortly before the six messages I mentioned by a registered user named 'melody1973'. This user had registered the same day a short time before the spam messages were posted.

Postings from both 'melody1973' and 'unknown' showed the same IP address of 115.197.220.92

David Watkins

Alex

I mentioned that I had not deleted any users that day but in fact I did delete the user 'melody1973'. It was right after I had deleted 'melody1973' that I checked the forum web pages and discovered the 6 spam messages by user 'unknown'.

Is there anything going on in the background that I am not aware of that would change a users name to 'unknown' on a posting by a user who no longer existed in the database?

David Watkins

Hello

the only way I can imagine is that it was a registered user who was deleted in the meantime. Are there other admins apart from you?

It seems that davwat did exactly that. But there (for me) are some additional question. Is an user able to delete his own account*? Would that be desirable**?

* Sorry that I didn't test it myself.
** I think it is not.

Tschö, Auge

--
Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

Hi David,
we had a registered user which turned out to be a SPAM engine (now we know).
we deleted the user account - but SPAMing continued, now the user name was "unknown".
in this case neither deleting the user nor banning the IP was of any effect.
then we realized that the session was still running. we killed the session and this was the end of the SPAMing - so far...

Best wishes,
PSPGadmin

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Spam Postings - How did they do it? (General)