As already mentioned, the next problem I have investigated is the large number of 0-post accounts without any activity created up until 16 January 2026 and one from today. It must be thousands as far as I could see. These were created automatically using a script or other methods over the last years. Maybe, some of them are genuine but most of them aren't. A key indicator for those accounts is whether they have never been visited or only once when creating. Fake accounts, or so-called ‘sleeper’ accounts, could be all those where it says: ‘Last visited: Never’ or ‘Last visited: [Date of creation]’ if looking into them. A genuine account is usually visited in the moment of creation and later from time to time. Real, new members set up all necessary things and take a look into their accounts. Anyway, those accounts are the ‘sleeper cells’ of the attack. They were not used to carry out the infection itself (the malicious code was introduced onto the server via a security vulnerability), but serve as infrastructure to make the spam appear legitimate to Google.
Here are two typical examples – accounts that really stand out because of their names and status ‘Last visited: Never’ which does not make any sense at all :
1. Building ‘domain trust’ (initial trust)
Large forums such as MSFN have safeguards in place against brand-new accounts. If a bot registers today and immediately posts 50 links, the system raises the alarm and blocks it.
Attackers therefore use automated scripts to register thousands of accounts in advance and simply leave them dormant for months. To the forum software (and to Google), the account ages. An account that has existed since “January 2026” will enjoy much greater trust in June 2026 than an account that is only 5 minutes old.
2. The profile spam method (hidden profile links)
This is probably the most common use case: every forum member has their own profile page (msfn.org/board/profile/XXXXX-username).
A normal user fills in their biography there.
A spam bot uses the ‘Website’, ‘About me’ or ‘Signature’ fields to insert Thai keywords and casino links there.
The key point: as these accounts have 0 posts, they never appear in active threads. No moderator and no member ever sees them in normal forum activity. But for the Google bot, these profile URLs do exist! The malicious code on the server (our cloaking parasite) now ensures that it feeds the Google bot internal lists of all registered profiles. Google crawls these profile pages, finds the Thai links and indexes them.
3. Exploitation of internal messaging systems (PM spam) or hidden drafts
Some sophisticated forum bots use dormant accounts to send spam messages (PMs) to other members in the background (which would, of course, have been noticed), or they create hundreds of posts in the ‘Drafts’ section. These drafts are never published, but exist as data fragments in the database. If the server-side malicious script specifically accesses these tables, it can trick the Google bot into believing that this content is public.
4. Why did the wave of registrations come to an end in January 2026?
The fact that no further accounts of this kind were created after January 2026 suggests two possible scenarios:
4.1. The loophole was (unintentionally) closed: The administrators may have installed an update to the forum software in January, for example, blocked registration for certain IP ranges or email providers.
4.2. The quota was full: By January, the attackers had generated enough ‘sleeper’ accounts to run their campaign for 2026 and withdrew the registration bots, as the accounts now simply had to ‘mature’.
These accounts are used for what is known as profile injection spam. They do not harm the forum database itself, but they serve as a ‘host’ for the hidden links that the server parasite then sends exclusively to Google.
For the administrator @xper, this means: not only he has to delete the malicious code, but he must also use a simple database command (SQL) to completely eliminate all accounts with 0 posts that were created over the last years and never visited or visited on the date of creation only, or contain dubious links in their profiles. Or much better, delete them all if there is no genuine activity, as they are then superfluous anyway, apparently not needed and pose a potential risk.