Query about Spammers

[PollyPoPo]

I'm curious. 

Question for the professionals out there (Merlin?).  When a spammer posts multiple posts over a period of, say, an hour (like pozy/nefi today) is that person actually sitting there doing the posting or is it set to automatically drop a post into topics?

It seems to me that if it was automated, the poster could drop in every single forum/topic instead of jumping around and it would be much faster than this guy. 

Or are these guys just amateurs or smarter doing it to stop anti-spam programs from catching them?

[Merlin the Elder]

Unfortunately, I'm not a security expert, otherwise I'd be making 3 or 4 times what the state is paying me. ...

I'm sure there are ways of automating the posting. Some of these hackers are extremely inventive. But I think most forum boards are protected from data posting (in a program code context) being relayed in from another server to a board as a post (in the forum context), and the automation would pretty much have to be coming from another server. 

So to answer you question simply, it would be difficult. 

Automating the creating/registering of new bogus users, on the other hand, seems to be quite simple, and no anti-spam solution that I've seen is 100% effective. I run one board that was getting several thousand attempts a month, and a certain percentage would get through, but the forum was targeted to a very small, and geographically focused area, and I ended up blacklisting entire countries to stop the spam.

I don't know why people get such jollies out of screwing with boards, but it is a huge problem.