Got Hit by New Type of Spam

[AWS]

At least it was new to me. Our newest members, tshirts, edited the profile page. On their profile they added a image in the shape of a heart which was also a poem. See the status updates in the sidebar. On first glance it seemed pretty innocent and even struck me as a unique addition to a profile. It almost got past me and in fact it would have if I didn't notice the link that was also left. The link itself didn't even seem like spam on first glance. I clicked and then the spam radar clicked in. The page was filled with at least 1000 links.

 

Now I go back the tshirts profile and check the image a little closer. When I hovered over it I couldn't believe my eyes. This image was linked from the same site and the alt text had those 1000 links in it. I decided to edit the profile to remove the image. This is where things started to look weird. They tried to link the image with an obfuscated link. It looked like what you see in those phishing emails. I wasn't thinking when I removed it all. I should have copied it and checked it out further. This might have been more than a spam attempt.

 

In any event I'm sure I'll see it again. Next time I'll save it and do further research. I would advise you watch for this one. If it is new I'm sure we'll all see it many times.

 

What's interesting about all this is this is the first time a spammer was actually able to post anything on this site or any of my other IPB sites. I guess you have to use something new to get spam through the IPB safety net.

[AWS]

She came back and added the sig again. I don't know if she is a spammer or just doesn't know any better. I banned her anyway.