SPYWARE used by spammers - Please check your PC
We have discovered that some of the spammers who regularly register on the forum are getting a prompt from Spyware. Therefore I urge you to check your PC regularly for Spyware and remove it, not only for our sake, but for your own privacy and safety. The main reason that spammers are registering here, and elsewhere, is to maximise the number of links back to their website. This means they are tricking Google into giving them a high page ranking which is good for their business.

Frank, In this case I assume the Spyware was used to track any PhPBB forum a user is accessing. This info is then transmitted to a bot (on a remote server) which then automatically registered a user on that forum. The bogus registration in the forum contains the URL of the site that they are promoting. Other fora have been attacked in a similar way. Does this make sense to you ?

Two programs that are good for finding and deleting spyware are AdAware by Lavasoft and Spybot. The former searches for tracking cookies and the latter for spyware executables. Both programs are free and can be downloaded from the web. I run each of them once per week.

Frank, I thought the same as you, but Tim identified an increase in spam which related to a particular user. They found and eradicated the Spyware. Obviously, I cannot prove that the Spyware was causing the problem but it seems very likely in this case.

Frank, Of course, we have had visual confirmation switched on for quite some time now. Some of the experts are convinced, judging by the volume of spam, that spammers have developed software to recognise this code. Alternatively, these registrations are being entered manually, prompted by the bot.