BS: influx of random posts

Subject: BS: influx of random posts
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 10:13 AM

Was todays event a casual attempt at vandalism or more of an attack?
Thanks to whoever dealt with the threat so quickly.
Keith.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: GUEST,Skipy
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 10:19 AM

Expand?
Skipy

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Bunnahabhain
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 10:23 AM

Did you wander into MOAB by accident? That could be taken for a large number of random posts.....

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 11:45 AM

There was a rush of old threads, refreshed with a single post of random words, from a Guest with random letters for a name.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: GUEST,Skipy
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 11:47 AM

Thanks Keith, makes sense now, I have seen one.
Regards Skipy

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Emma B
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 01:55 PM

Spotted a rash of the gobbeldy-gook this morning.
Well done the clone who cleaned up the mess.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: MMario
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 02:04 PM

probably sombebody's spambotr. Had another one a few minutes ago.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 07:09 PM

I noticed that there were way more music threads running than usual, but I didn't open them to see what they were about. This answers it, apparently.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: JennyO
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 11:02 PM

There's another spate of them, which I have mentioned on the Help Forum. They don't seem to have been spotted yet.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 11:20 PM

Interesting. It moves quickly enough to suggest it's automated. Seems odd all the ones I've seen in this batch have add: in the title - can't imagine that just be a random hit on threadids.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: bobad
Date: 22 Jun 06 - 11:25 PM

Looks like Klaatu may be visiting again.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: JennyO
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 04:08 AM

And who, or what, is Klaatu?

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: John O'L
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 04:27 AM

Klaatu

Dunno what it's got to do with botviruses or whatever they are.
Oh, I see.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 04:50 AM

Klaatu was the alien in The day the world stood still, played by Micael Rennie.

I'm glad I found this thread. I looked at the 'cat yesterday and found a load of these junk additions. I sent a PM to alert Joe, suggesting the clones needed to do something. I then went back to the forum to find they had all disppered, so wondered if I had imagined it all.

Thanks for the sanity check.
Quack!
Geoff.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 04:55 AM

Mind you. I think that this thread ought to be recasified as TECH and placed above the line. A lot of catters claim to not read the BS section. This information ought to be where they WILL find it because the clones might need feedback if this sort of event/atack/glitch/gremlin happens again.
Quack!
Geoff.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: AVFP
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 05:20 AM

Thanks for the heads up in the HELP Forum. Please post there as opposed to on a thread as we'd prefer to keep a lower profile as far as the spammers go. I removed well over 30. Probably a lot more but I didn't count.---AVFP

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Rasener
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 06:03 AM

This has been posted on my old ISP forum. Is it related. This is an official post from the ISP management.

Forums are being scanned (- 7th June 2006 until - 8th July 2006)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guys, we are seeing a high level of russian signups recently, ones that claim to be hackers, so what may happen is our forums may go down for a while to protect ourselves, we think they are scanning our system, we dont know why they are here.
However we are going to watch the network very closely for the next few months to prevent a hacker from attempting any attack on Firenets infrastructure. So if the forums go down, please note, it is only network engineers working on the service.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 06:08 AM

What action DO you want us to take if we spot new occurrences?
Who, what or where is the best place to make sure that action gets takes to correct such problems?
Quack!
Geoff.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: GUEST, Topsie
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 06:25 AM

Might there be a connection with the spam that turned up recently on the marmite thread?
The gobbledygook is similar to what I used to get in that kind of spam in my emails, so maybe the people who used to send those have moved from individual emails to message boards.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Paul Burke
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 07:16 AM

Can I suggest a deterrent, which might ease other problems too? That is to bar guests from posting directly, but ask them to supply an email address to which a message is sent, and require that they must send the email back to get the post listed. If some people are worried about privacy, assure them that email addresses will be deleted when the reply is received or within 24 hours.

It will certainly deter some guests, but I think not most bona-fide ones.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: GUEST, Topsie
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 08:05 AM

It would limit the spontaneity a bit, but in the circumstances, probably a good idea.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 11:12 AM

Search on the topic of members only posting and you'll find a lot of virtual ink on the subject.

Subject: RE: BS: influx of random posts
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Jun 06 - 07:36 PM

The note by Villan (23 Jun 06 - 06:03 AM) re "a lot of Russian posts" suggests the remote possibility of someone trying to post using an odd language setup. The descriptions of the posts otherwise make this unlikely, but has anyone who's seen one tried switching "Languages" (in IE, View - Encoding) to see if any of the gobbledegook does make sense in some other encoding?

I've found a few regulars for whom I have to swap off encodings to see some of the characters - between "Wesern European(ISO) for some and the Western European (Windows) flavor for others; and a few posts show up better in "Unicode." It's usually just one or a few char that don't come across here, but on other sites I've seen a fair number of posts by people in China that look like random gibberish.

I do get a fair amount of email spam that seems obviously to be just using random letters to get past filters, but it's nearly always from the same few .ca servers so it's easy to detect.

John