"Buddha2" PM Spam at thousands of VB forums

[creativepart]

Today my forum got his with Buddhist Spam from a new (today) user from IP address 128.241.40.186. His username was Buddha. His email address was [email protected].

He spammed 75 of my users with a buddhist message and a link (that I have not followed).

In doing my research on this tonight I find 13,000 Google references to this guy and the exact same spam and they all are on VB bulletin boards -- but not all today. It appears that this has been going on for some time.

What's up with this and what can be done about it. I did a couple of searches here and found only one or two mentions -- but this is widespread and it seems that vB should be pro-active on this kind of thing.

What's going on??
Paul Green

[Steve Machol]

What do you suggest we do? If someone legitimately registers on your forums and you allow him to send PMs, then this kind of thing is going to happen.

The only way to fight it is to start limiting the PM rights of new members by removing this permission from the Registered Usergroup.

Then you can set up a promotion to automatically promote users with x number of posts to a new Usergroup that does have PM permissions.

[creativepart]

How does a new user get usernames and send out 100 pms in 15 mins??? This does not seem to be a manual process. I treated this as some kind of exploit that is allowing a spammer to use the vB system to do this without permission. Obviously, if it's someone manually sending out PMs that's not a vB issue. But if someone is exploiting the system then that's another story.

[Odoin]

There are many automated programs out there that allow people to send PMs, and even post on vbulletin and other forum platforms. Like Steve said disable PMs for new members until they have X amount of posts this will help.

Mark

[Tom_S]

Same guy/gal did it on mine. That time frame is a bit exaggerated there. It took him/her a bit longer than 15 minutes to accomplish the task. At 15 pm's I pm'd him/her and requested he/her to stop. I then took my daughter to a doctors appointment. I returned two hours later. Him/her was then up to 125 members. I banned him/her went into phpMyadmin and deleted all the pm's and that was that.

[Qryztufre]

he's been on my forum... and from the looks of it, it's actually manual.

[Tom_S]

FYI, I since figured out I am an idot and you can delete a users PM's from thier account in the ACP from their account at the "Quick User Links" by selecting "Delete All User's Private Messages" or better yet just Ban and Delete the user.

[cyburbia]

Registered on my forum from [email protected] at 198.172.201.70. Because users with fewer than five posts can't send PMs, his Buddhist spam didn't find its way to my users.