Emufarmers Sangly wrote:
So botnets are having their slaves use gibberish
postings as a method of
phoning home? That's absolutely devious, but it sounds like a logistical
nightmare in comparison to current methods: You wouldn't know which
gibberish string belongs to which bot unless it had already communicated its
identification string to you beforehand, in which case there would be no
need to phone home!
You can tell them the "gibberish string" to use, no
need to have the
software calling you to tell the vulnerable page list. You won't be
traced by the cops for searching racrodr on google!
I'm sure the evil masterminds behind such
operations
could probably engineer a solution around that issue, but adding gibberish
to random wikis still seems like a pretty far-out method of communication in
comparison to just identifying through an IRC channel or a Web page or
whatever. (The only real benefit I could see to this scheme is that it would
be harder to infiltrate or break, which may now be at the top of the
botmaster's concerns.)
It makes most sense. Not only did the bots post it, but it was still
there when googlebot spidered that web (few or null spam-cleaning), so
if they had spammed "Buy my viagra", google would have indexed it.