Fergie's Tech Blog

Bot Authors Targeting phpBB Forums

Via Netcraft.

Bots are registering user accounts on thousands of phpBB forums across the Internet, raising concerns that the bot's authors are laying the groundwork for mass exploitation down the road. The activity of a bot named FuntKlakow was discussed in a Digg thread Sunday, with many forum owners confirming that FuntKlakow had created accounts and even posted simplistic messages ("O How nice" and "Wow that is cool").

FuntKlakow's post signatures have included links to proxy surfing and "traffic generator" services, raising the prospect that its goal may be spam rather than exploits. But as noted on a German site that issued an early warning about the bot's behavior, "the next time the phpBB announces a critical vulnerability, the bot would have everything ready (just a post click away) from attacking thousands of sites/forums." Google searches suggested the bot may have created accounts on as many as 33,000 forums.

posted by Fergie @ 3/20/2006 08:13:00 AM