[SAC] Wiki Spammer - even more elaborate fake user

[Christian Willmes]

Hello,

I unblocked Harry, because he is definitely not a spammer! In contrary,
he offered me a lot of really helpful information about how to fight
spam in a mediawiki, because he has knowledge from the OpenStreetMap and
the Open Knowledge Foundations wiki instances on this topic.

I recently blogged about the problem, after which Harry contacted me:

http://cwillmes.de/blog/2016/08/02/the-daily-kindergardening-of-osgeo-wiki-spammers/

Beside this, from next week (12th September) I will be mostly away from
internet until first week of October.

I would like to ask others from this list to also decide on incoming
account requests:

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:ConfirmAccounts

Currently we have about 3-5 requests a day to decide on. Additionaly, we
need to check the recent changes for span and block and mass delete
spammers and their contents (easy done via the block and mass delete
functionality).

If you want to help, and do not have the according permissions in the
wiki, say so, and I will grand you this rights.

Regards,
Christian


On 04.09.2016 09:36, Markus Neteler wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 2:05 AM, Brian M Hamlin <maplabs at light42.com> wrote:
>> Hi SAC -
>>
>>   a quick look shows a real Harry Wood, who is quite involved withOSM and
>> OSM Wiki.. SO perhaps Sandro is right .. I dont know what to do.. the wiki
>> is valuable to OSGeo.org.
> Looking at
> https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Harry_Wood
> there is tons of spam which was recently created through this account.
> So, perhaps compromised?
>
> When unlocking, for sure the pw must be changed.
>
> Quick question: why redirect to a "spam" page rather than deleting the
> spam pages completely? With the redirect still the ugly page titles
> remain which carry spam messages.
>
>>   In the past it was enough to check for spam and then put that fake user
>> out..
>> This occurrance ranks as a new level of complexity in an attack..
> I fully agree.
>
>>   Years ago, before Christian W. started, I was awarded a star of Spam
>> Blocker for my wiki tending efforts. Now, I dont know how to react to this..
>> the spammers are certainly winning,
>> they are paid pennies for this ?
> I suspect yes. Yet I don't understand why since the spam content is
> rather useless, not even professional. Weird.
>
> Best
> Markus
>
>> and yet they foil diligent defense.
>>   --Brian M Hamlin
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