2025-07-21: We have updated our Privacy Policy. Thanks to Vietnamese blackhat SEO wannabe DDoS:ing forums with Russian xrumer malware developed by Aleksandr Ryanchenko (Александр Рябченко/Alexandru Robu, botmaster.net@gmail.com) for automatic registrations and spam, this forum is manually moderated.

User-agent HappyWing identifies a new forum posting & registration spam bot

Questions and discussion about web design, search engine optimisation and hosting
s
Posts: 395
Joined: 2017-7-5 09:58

Post by s » 2025-9-1 07:34

I noticed a few days a ago a new automated bot crawling the forum. The user agent had a string "HappyWing" which revealed nothing and it was not properly marked as a bot, crawler or spider as none of those words were present in the user-agent string.

The bot behaves like malware as it does not respect robots.txt and it tries to register spam users and post spam to the forum. It behaves a bit like the Russian malware xrumer/xevil so this could be yet another clueless script kiddie who has just learned to spoof user-agent string, or the malware developer trying desperately to figure out new ways circumvent forum anti-spam measures.
HappyWing is a new forum posting and registration spam bot As a result, I will remove the legitimate bot status from HappyWing meaning that Web Server connections will be automatically cut whenever it tries attack again. Gotta love the idiots like Aleksandr Ryanchenko/Александр Рябченко who make their living by developing malware for spammers.