[wplug] Wiki Gibberish

[Andrew Fisk]

On May 4, 2009, at Monday, May 4, 200910:12 AM, Michael Semcheski wrote:

> 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.
>
> Mike
> _______________________________________________
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> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug
>


It's really just the just the news -- most people seem to be happy to  
hear gibberish rather than real information.


Thanks

Andy
Spitfire Computer Services
Suite 19
2301 Duss Ave.
Ambridge, PA 15003
Phone (724) 266-4642
fax: (724) 266-4645
andy at spitcomp.com
www.spitcomp.com