There are very few categories of people who I would line up against a wall and have shot...

[jducoeur]

... but Russian spammers have managed to make their way into that list.

I just discovered that the Rolls Ethereal have been vandalized -- utterly, meticulously and very intentionally destroyed -- by a spammer. Special. Not going to be simple to recover, either, since the bad data is interleaved with the good in the logs. In theory, I can fix this; in practice, it hasn't been done before, and some of the tools I need don't exist yet (I added the logging facility a long time ago, but not the tool to recover from the logs), so a bunch of time that was going to be spent on wiki-tech instead has to be spent on the Rolls. What fun.

Anybody know a good captcha package for Perl that I can drop in here?

Comments

stupid other login

[tpau]

what did they do to them? andis it in russian?

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

Not in Russian per se, but there are a fair number of links back to Russian sites according to the person who pointed it out to me, and the style matches the wikispam that is (AFAIK) mostly coming out of Russia these days...

Re: stupid other login

[tpau]

what IS wikispam?

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

See other comment...

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

Oh, and as for what they did -- lots of stuff. It looks like they were originally just adding sporadic bogus entries that would link to their paid websites. Then, probably sometime recently, someone went through and automated the whole thing, deleting all the real entries and adding literally tens of thousands of bogus ones pointing to their customers.

It's standard wikispam stuff: they stuff a real website full of their BS, all as interlinked as they can get it, to drive up the Google ratings of their customers. Unclear how well it actually works, but it's big business nowadays. It's why wikis are in a constant arms race against the vandals these days...

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

Followup: and as I go through the DB, a remarkably large number of the entries even *say* that they are from Ukraine or Russia. Heaven only knows what they think they're gaining by admitting it...

Re: stupid other login

[tpau]

they may be putting real names and adressesintowhat htey htik is a searchable db,, thus spreadignthemj aroudnteh net? no idea. they might also just be bored 13 year olds in russia with little better to do.

remember currently russia has no enforsible laws, noone enforcing anythign and almost no acountability. whee

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

Yep -- AFAIK, that's why it's become a haven for these spammers.

Speaking of which: is "Koshkitko" a real Russian name? Or does it mean something? It's showing up in the name field of a large number of the bogus entries, and I'm curious whether it's the hack-handle of the person behind those particular entries...

Re: stupid other login

[tpau]

it can be a name, Ukranian in origin judging by the 'ko' ending...