Having trouble with bots placing gibberish on our site. I first want to understand the why? It could be : * They testing or trying to get setup to spam search engine indexes? * They are measuring the time to rollback? * Spy code words - pass information anonymously without traceability? * Want to destroy search engine ranking? * ?? Anyone have a clear understanding of this?

Having trouble with bots placing gibberish on our site. I first want to understand the why? It could be : * They testing or trying to get setup to spam search engine indexes? * They are measuring the time to rollback? * Spy code words - pass information anonymously without traceability? * Want to destroy search engine ranking? * ?? Anyone have a clear understanding of this?

Emufarmers Sangly wrote: trigger I've had good luck doing this with reCaptcha. It eliminated (so far) all user-creation bots and valdalbots.

MediaWiki could improve its anti-spam pages by creating a new page that lists the kind of attacks that MediaWiki administrators are running into. I had hoped that this fix would also stop the spambot which is creating dummy user accounts with fake Russian email addresses. I stopped the gibberish, but not the fake Russian accounts.

Emufarmers Sangly wrote: simply I'm not sure I agree - the defacement comes regularly from a wide range of IP - I would assume a bot net. The defacement often has the same words. I could see this as a way of passing code words by foreign agents - much to much trouble just for true vandalism. I suppose the NSA would know about it in that case. By splattering the messages across a large number of wikis there would be no meaningful IP trail to the recipient. A CAPTCHA has stopped it for now... ---------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Schmidt EMail Karl(a)xtronics.com Transtronics, Inc. WEB http://xtronics.com 3209 West 9th Street Ph (785) 841-3089 Lawrence, KS 66049 FAX (785) 841-0434 True wisdom is knowing what we don't know; True maturity is being comfortable with the idea of not knowing. -KPS ---------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

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!

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.)

Thanks Emufarmers for the advice... I have still yet to implement, but just noticed something and wonder if others are seeing it too. On my wiki the bot is not just inserting random gibberish words, it is also changing symbols to strange characters. For example as seen here< http://www.teampedia.net/wiki/index.php?title=Captain%27s_Coming%21&dif… : " (a quote symbol) becomes â (the letter a with an accent) any other theories or solutions? On Nov 3, 2007 8:31 PM, Emufarmers Sangly &lt;emufarmers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > On Nov 3, 2007 9:31 PM, Seth Marbin &lt;smarbin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > I have been having the same problem (random gibberish edits) on my > > teampedia.net for the past few weeks. > > I am already using ConfirmEdit, but only have the default setting > enabled > > (thus no captcha for all edits). > > > I am considering two options: > > - Disabling anonymous edits (i.e. requiring users to register before > > editing/adding) > > - Changing it so the captchas trigger on any edit. > > > Any advice about which way to go? > > The least obtrusive option would be a combination of the two: Enable the > CAPTCHA for unregistered users' edits, and for registration attempts, but > let logged-in users edit freely. > -- > Arr, ye emus, http://emufarmers.com > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Yeah - it seems that the bot is reading in the whole page, into a string, sticking its 'calling card' at the front ;-), and then submitting the whole string back to the wiki, screwing up special characters as it goes. This is only annoying if you accidentally delete the spam word instead of undoing the whole edit.