[pmwiki-users] what to do in case of massive spam ?
Petko Yotov
5ko at 5ko.fr
Tue Mar 22 14:36:36 CDT 2016
On 2016-03-22 18:38, ABClf wrote:
> what can we do in case of massive spam, when dozens of pages are
> suddenly spammed (needing many delete or restore action) ?
> do pmwiki admins have tools to easily clean the pollution ?
Yes, I have SSH access so I can easily remove the newly created spam
pages.
For a few hours last night, and two times today, pmwiki.org had massive
spamming "attacks" with 180+ pages defaced or created, and files
uploaded. I suspect the perpetrator is a real person operating bots
because after I block some words and expressions, the person adapts,
changes tactics and succeeds again. For example I blocked "0nline tech"
(and a few more) and after it there appears "o.n.l.i.n.e t,e,c,h": such
variants are harder to block without accidentally blocking legitimate
strings.
We have $EnableWhyBlocked set to 1 and it explains what is causing the
post to be blocked, that's why I suspect a real person sees this and
adapts.
I can easily extract and block the IP addresses* and (not that easily)
words in SiteAdmin.Blocklist. Restoring an existing page from the
history is done from the wiki; I can relative easily delete the last 2
history entries from an existing page that was spammed, so that we not
need to see the spam in the diffs; then I also remove the links in
(All)RecentChanges pages, because sometimes the page names or summaries
contain spam.
It is a waste of time: it took me 3 hours this morning even if a few
others had started deleting the spam during the night (night at my time
zone).
Huge thanks to all who helped! :-)
(Please leave to me the clean up of the AllRecentChanges page so that I
easily notice and review what can be blocked from the deleted pages.)
It is also a waste of time for the person who does this, because all
pages are restored or deleted a few minutes or a few hours later. :-)
Petko
(*) I use mostly the tools grep, sed from the bash shell, and vim. Now I
think about ways to automate this.
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