Wiki testing
I got a tip about a wiki spammer:
69.31.131.178
So far I’ve only seen wiki vandalism. And some is very subtle. IE, it isn’t visible. But some wiki users have complained that he’s deleted content off pages.
I see lots of instances of experimenting. He’s adding Disney links that turn out to be completely invisible. But they’re easy to find on Google, as you can see. The game may be to see which wiki moderators are sleeping on the job - not checking diffs.
But his changes are certainly excessive. Here’s an example of user contributions to one wiki.
The IP number loads a website belonging to 24-7-solutions.net.
One of the techs is apparently Russian. First name Sergey. Oh, and they have a Russian language version of their site. Just search for the ICQ numbers, and you’ll find it.
September 18th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
I have seen non “testing” versions of this recently. Halz has emailed a MediaWiki developer about this. We have known about this problem for a good while but didn’t want to publisize it. It appears it is becomming more popular now anyway.
September 19th, 2005 at 11:57 am
[…] ted in guestbook spamming before. Dyndns subdomains hosted on: 69.93.145.180 I found the wiki testing bot active on the same wiki, before the 69.31.82.66 bot showed up. 69.31.131.178 T […]
September 27th, 2005 at 1:30 am
He is experimentation is getting more sophisticated. Now he is posting his spam from one proxy out of a large pool of proxies and then immediately replacing the spam (using another, different, proxy) with a bunch of blank lines. I assume his goal is to thwart wiki’s that support rollback and get his links into the revision history without detection. The strategy seems rather dubious, since many wikis now mark old revisions with noindex, nofollow).
October 9th, 2005 at 4:55 am
[…] isible wiki spammer hits again My “other” wiki got a visit from our invisible wiki spammer. He uses tags that make his spam invisible on Mediawiki. And then he adds […]