Alden Bates' Weblog

I've been being hit recently by a spammer using urls of the form forex.somefreehostorother.com and using a botnet to avoid giving away their IP address. Fortunately the spammer's stupid script was thrown by a decoy comment form, thus no comments reached my weblog. The target URLs all redirect to this site which has probably fake details:

forex-broker-list dot com
Alexey Petrov (Petrov_Alex@mail.ru)
+7.5734503XXXX
Lenina st. 45
Sochi, 567843
RU

Forex is not Australian beer, BTW, but is short for "foreign exchange".

I suspect that this may be related to an event that occurred late last month when someone unleashed a spider on my site. The spider's user-agent (which had HTML in it. Urgh) included the text "Forex Trading Network Organization" and a link to netforex dot org, a site which currently consists of a front page with a non-functional search form and a broken link to a directory. IncrediBILL wrote about the netforex bot at the time of the spidering.