

 Anyone else seeing lots of MediaWikis getting hijacked by spammers? - Natsu
http://www.preventioncommunities.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges

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Natsu
Just to note: I have no connection to this particular wiki, it's just a
particularly bad example of a spambot infestation. I've been following the
trail of spam, and it leads me straight from one spam-filled copy of MediaWiki
to another.

Obviously, the intent here is to create a network of otherwise-legitimate
sites that can be used by blackhat SEOs to inflate their relevance.

I just wondered if anyone else has information on who is behind this.

EDIT: So far I've found hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Drupal sites are
also affected. The latest spam run, as far as I can see, appears to have
started on or about the 27th. I'm trying to figure out if there's some way I
could write a crawler to map out the spam network by reading the 'recent
changes' pages on affected wikis, but that would take quite a bit of
bandwidth, because it appears that they've attacked a ton of random sites,
some of which appear to have gone unused for a long time.

