[Mediawiki-l] Giberish - by bots?

[Karl Schmidt]

Emufarmers Sangly wrote:
> On 10/28/07, Karl Schmidt <karl at xtronics.com> wrote:
>> 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?
> 
> 
> As near as I can tell, these bots (I would call them vandalbots) are simply
> out to maliciously damage wikis,


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...


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Karl Schmidt                         EMail Karl at xtronics.com
Transtronics, Inc.                     WEB http://xtronics.com
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True wisdom is knowing what we don't know;
True maturity is being comfortable with the idea of not knowing.  -KPS

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