Quote:
Originally Posted by robo
Might seem like a stupid question but what the hell do spammers get out of this  . There cant be money in it and it takes up shit loads of time. |
It is money -- they're getting paid for "SEO", or promoting certain sites on Google, in other words. One way to do that is to get lots of links to the site with the right keywords in the link text from other reputable sites. Forums and blog comments are a popular target. A script that creates users and posts messages with links on a certain vBulletin version will work on a multitude of forums, making them a high-gain target. Forum software gets updated often plugging security holes that allow such automated spam. Looks like the version we're using here was released in 2006, I'm surprised it held so long, really.