Porn Links Overflow Irish Message Boards

Links to porn websites flow extensively on Irish message boards and guest books, told Alan Finan to ENN on July 10, 2007.

Alan said he discovered more than 300 Irish websites where spammers targeted the sites' message boards, blogs and guest books by sending Web links to sites providing porn, especially child pornography and pharmaceutical items.

Alan also found that a number of links in the websites directed to programs called porn dialers. These applications would employ trojans to infect users' PCs and then dial up these expensive sites resulting in a financial downturn for the site owner.

It was possible that the owners of the affected sites were unaware of the attacks on them. According to Fergal O'Byrne, CEO of the association, a large number of people perhaps wouldn't know the existence of such content on their websites, which nobody would otherwise overlook, said O'Byrne while speaking to ENN on July 10, 2007.

Finan used a virtual PC during his research. In the first week of his study more than 400 Trojan viruses attacked it. He pointed out to ENN several cases of message boards and blogs where he found links to offensive sites.

This kind of attacks hit many of Ireland's third-level educational institutions' websites. Two of them were IT Sligo and Dundalk IT's student union message boards.

For confirmation, ENN visited the message board of irelandplanner.com, which enjoys the copyright of Galway East Tourism. It found the message board filled with spam threads. The links were entitled as ">18 years? Watch this", "New Teens" and "The biggest collection of adult banned videos".

Finan believes the problem could survive only because people operating the sites were not monitoring their content properly.

The key protection is to maintain updated message board software. By deploying legitimate programs and ensuring their update, it is relatively easy to protect a website from spam attacks. It is also important to watch on system outages, said Adam Beecher, an Internet consultant who operates the message board 'Foot' on Irish soccer. Foot uses vBulletin software similar as boards, according to ENN on July 10, 2007.

Related article: Porn-Related Websites Creating The Greatest Threat on The Internet

» SPAMfighter News - 7/24/2007