[wplug] Wiki Gibberish

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2009/5/4 Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com>:
> Hey Everybody,
>
> The WPLUG wiki has been under constant (and increasing) fire from bots
> that seem to post utter gibberish on some pages.
>
> For now, anonymous users have to complete a recaptcha to edit a page.
> We'll see how it works.
>
> The reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone has a good theory on
> why they do it?  There are no links in the gibberish, some of it is
> Cyrillic, some of it is English that doesn't make any sense.
>
> I've got three theories, but if anyone has any thing to add, or a
> better theory, I'd be interested in hearing it.
>
> 1)  Its steganography, and the bots are controlled by a powerful
> intelligence organization.
>
> 2)  The bots are part of a wave of feelers that hope to find poorly
> maintained wikis.  The botmaster then searches for specific gibberish,
> and the results returned are all poorly maintained wikis.
>
> 3)  They are poorly written bots.  The author intended for them to
> wiki-spam, but there's a bug that causes them not to post the link.
>
>
> There are a lot of similarities between the wiki spam and some of the
> email spam that comes.  Obviously there's a connection, but the reason
> eludes me.

A bunch of organizations that want to communicate secretly use spam as
ways of sending messages where both the origin and target can't be
discerned. Usually the sequence of words has some other meaning, it's
based on some encryption algorithm i don't know too much about. Spam's
great because you don't know who the message is intended for, even if
you decrypt it.

-Yaakov