Strange Posts on Forum

[rbryan]

I've noticed several strange threads lately, having nothing to do with the Forum. There's one right now about the Washington Redskins for example.

I'm wondering if these are somehow autogenerated spam posts or if there's a real person on the other end.

[Donna D.]

Spammers. I've reported 3-4 in the past couple of days.

[Jon in AZ]

Yes, spam. I had an exchange about them with a site administrator. She said sometimes the site software catches it; sometimes not. Her recommendation was never to respond, and flag them immediately as spam.

Like Donna, I've flagged more than usual recently.

[Glenn Baglo]

It's been going on for a long time. Many are caught by admin and are only briefly up.
Wish admin would tell us what the posters are attempting to do, if they know. Just curious.

[k0wtz]

sort of like letting the sleeping dog lie

bob

[steve dunham]

I've translated several of these posts into English .
They are the writings of a very sick individual.

[Mary F]

What Donna said. Spammers. Trying to take advantage of our site. We catch most of them and it's helpful if y'all will just report them if you see them, in case we miss some.

[Glenn Baglo]

Originally Posted by Mary F

What Donna said. Spammers. Trying to take advantage of our site. We catch most of them and it's helpful if y'all will just report them if you see them, in case we miss some.

I get that, but what's the scam? How does posting "kdalj" get them anywhere?

[k corbin]

it means ... you have been attacked by a spambot

[Glenn Baglo]

Originally Posted by k corbin

it means ... you have been attacked by a spambot

To what end?
And, it's the site that's been attacked, not me.

[Donna D.]

Originally Posted by Glenn Baglo

I get that, but what's the scam? How does posting "kdalj" get them anywhere?

Who knows what goes on in the mind of anyone out to do nefarious plots. Not everyone who does evil is interested in stealing your identity. Some are just evil for their own thrills. Like the %^&*$#d that took FiberglassRV down 11-12-2005 and we lost all the threads to cyberspace.

[rbryan]

As a cybersecurity engineer, I stopped trying to understand the motive of bad actors long ago. My job was to prevent and mitigate, not dive in to a pack of sick minds. As Donna said, sometimes it's just to prove they can do it, sometimes it's bragging rights among fellow hackers, and sometimes it's a concerted criminal effort for extortion or financial gain.

As a side note, here's the sole piece of advice I always have: have a backup of your data, on an external non-network source. If for example FGRV had a backup in 2005, everything could have been restored. If all the victims of the recent Wannacry ransomware attacks had a backup, they could have laughed at the ransom demands, wiped their systems and restored. Always, always, have a backup.

[Jim Bennett]

Originally Posted by Glenn Baglo

I get that, but what's the scam? How does posting "kdalj" get them anywhere?

The techie guys here have set it up so that a new member that posts a link in their first few posts will get flagged, and for the reason to catch these spammers that are trying to post hyper-links to make some money off. These get help and not posted until a moderator reviews. We delete a dozen or two of these daily, and are not seen by the general membership.

The work-around for these spammer types, is to first post without the link, then edit to add the link afterwards. We do still usually see this, but the thread can sit with the active link until we delete it and ban the spammer.

Folks should realize that they should never click any of these links, as it then gives a wee bit of revenue to the spammer. If they make it to this stage, do report them as we will get notice of your report right away.

Please excuse my lacking of the proper technical terminology here.

Man, if these spammers just put as much effort to a good purpose, you'd think they would likely be better off.

[Johnny M]

From past experience, I recommend 3 backups (2 minimum). One on the server or computer, i.e. a daily backup. Then two external backups on two different external hard drives, one weekly and one monthly (and don't keep them connected all the time, just during the backup process). At one point early in my business a computer hard drive failed and the backup hard drive connected to the computer also failed and it cost me big $$$ to have the important data recovered in a "clean room" environment.

May sound like redundancy, but if you ever need it you will be glad you were redundant.

[Daniel A.]

My own forum not related to trailers has the same issue we manually activate accounts. The first giveaway is the user name then the IP. We have blocked a number of IP's but they have changed to EU IP's . Normally we get around 20 per day. They do originate in Russia.

[Glenn Baglo]

On backup, on the other hand, company IT wiped the drive on my company computer twice, trashing all my private files as well.
Months later, all I could think of that I was missing was a single photo ( that I still wish I had ).
Lots of room for more stuff.

[rbryan]

Originally Posted by Johnny M

From past experience, I recommend 3 backups (2 minimum).

Very sound. This is what we do in datacenters. Tiered storage and backups on system, off system and off site. One of the fastest ways to get fired if you're a datacenter admin is to lose data because of an inadequate backup/restore/DR strategy.

[Darral T.]

and ALWAYS "TEST" your backups!! Otherwise, you have NO idea if they'll work when you need them or if they'll be corrupt, contaminated.... I take ours to a 3rd party once a year for a FULL "restore" and they have us up and running on "virtual" servers within one hour with the "back up" data.

Of course I will "mount" our data at least once a week to make sure it's easy to get to in house.

And with all of this including cooperate antivirus software, webfilters... it all still concerns me.

Originally Posted by rbryan

Very sound. This is what we do in datacenters. Tiered storage and backups on system, off system and off site. One of the fastest ways to get fired if you're a datacenter admin is to lose data because of an inadequate backup/restore/DR strategy.