The Gambit wiki has regularly been the target of some random vandalism. Yesterday we hit a new high with over a dozen vandalized pages. I don't know what to think. Is someone getting any enjoyment out of this? Is it the result of some robot? In any case I can't continue wasting time repairing the vandalism. Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Marc
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At 10:40 -0400 2007/10/13, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Oct 13, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Require a login, confirmed by email, to edit content?
And/or changes from unregistered users have to be confirmed by a user.
Or blacklist IP addresse blocks, or even whitelist blocks with registered users.
Is there a page to see recent activity?
At 10:07 AM 10/13/2007, Stephane Le Cornec wrote:
At 10:40 -0400 2007/10/13, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Oct 13, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Require a login, confirmed by email, to edit content?
And/or changes from unregistered users have to be confirmed by a user.
Users have to be authorized by an administrator; Scheme Punks was being hit by people/robots who created accounts (both are standard MediaWikis, so there are standard attacks to match).
There are some existing sophisticated solutions out there, I can check the Scheme Punks' mailing lists.
Or blacklist IP addresse blocks,
Wack-a-mole, unless you want to start by blacklisting all of East Asia (maybe minus Japan (lots of unprotected systems))....
or even whitelist blocks with registered users.
Is there a page to see recent activity?
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Recentchang...
A standard MediaWiki feature, you can navigate to it from the main page Special Pages link generally at the lower left.
- Harold
At 10:50 -0500 2007/10/13, Harold Ancell wrote:
At 10:07 AM 10/13/2007, Stephane Le Cornec wrote:
<snip>
Is there a page to see recent activity?
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Recentchang...
A standard MediaWiki feature, you can navigate to it from the main page Special Pages link generally at the lower left.
thx
Server seems to live 4 hours in the future, I guess this is GMT.
I reverted some pages and both the vandalism and my reverts are using 132.204.24.179 which seems to be himalia.iro.umontreal.ca
Im going to put my tinfoil hat and give you some theory for your amusement. Actually this vandalism is how botnets give feedback to their operator. Hope you get a good laugh out of that one. <G>
At 09:40 AM 10/13/2007, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Oct 13, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Anyone have a > suggestion on how to deal with this?
Require a login, confirmed by email, to edit content?
That will hinder people who want to help, especially since MediaWiki isn't so good about maintaining sessions or remembering users.
If you're willing to wait up to a day, I check the site every morning and will revert vandalism (don't have authority to delete pages, though), and would be happy to fight this clown for a week or so to see if he gives up.
It looks like the same person from a PRC address started the vandalism on the Gambit Wiki on the same day as he hit the Scheme Punks (ERR5RS among other things) Wiki, same style and about the same number of edits.
Scheme Punks then got spammed (new pages) by perhaps the same person (Chinese language, I think (not Japanese or Korean)) and the administrator instituted a system where new pages can only be created by logged in and pre-authorized users (this works for the ERR5RS effort, might not be so good for Gambit).
And it's still suffering from the random psuedo-word insertion vandalism as of today (plus I just noticed some link spam).
And, yeah, some people just revel in vandalism. Very recent statistics seem to show that the psychic payoff for participating in the Wikipedia community hit a tipping point in February, and I think at least a third of that is vandals masquerading as Wiki- lawyer "deletionists" who just enjoy destroying other people's work. Wikipedia is also constantly vandalized in this general sort of way, but what has prompted someone to attack seriously obscure Scheme sites is open to question. Given how automated attacks were half a decade ago, I'd guess just random port-80 "do I see a MediaWiki?" scanning.
Which implies this may be a robot rather than someone we can deter with reverts....
- Harold
I am no expert on wikis but maybe setting the wiki to only accept changes from logged in users (can you do that?) would be a good enough deterent.
On 10/13/07, Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:
The Gambit wiki has regularly been the target of some random vandalism. Yesterday we hit a new high with over a dozen vandalized pages. I don't know what to think. Is someone getting any enjoyment out of this? Is it the result of some robot? In any case I can't continue wasting time repairing the vandalism. Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Marc
Gambit-list mailing list Gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
Hi Marc,
On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 10:28:35 -0400 Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:
The Gambit wiki has regularly been the target of some random vandalism. Yesterday we hit a new high with over a dozen vandalized pages. I don't know what to think. Is someone getting any enjoyment out of this? Is it the result of some robot? In any case I can't continue wasting time repairing the vandalism. Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
We had this problem with the Chicken Wiki (http://chicken.wiki.br) too. We could get rid of spammer by adopting some simple restrictions:
1. each page has a basic arithmetic question (e.g., 2 + 3) which has to be correctly answered before the changes are saved.
2. the index page, which is the main target for spammers, requires authentication (user & passwd).
The Chicken Wiki uses Svnwiki (http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/svnwiki).
From what we could notice, most (if not all) attacks against the Chicken
Wiki were not result of robots. They were made by humans.
Best wishes, Mario
On 13-Oct-07, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
The Gambit wiki has regularly been the target of some random vandalism. Yesterday we hit a new high with over a dozen vandalized pages. I don't know what to think. Is someone getting any enjoyment out of this? Is it the result of some robot? In any case I can't continue wasting time repairing the vandalism. Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Marc
I've decided to restrict edit privileges to logged in users. Currently anyone can create an account. Let's see if that works.
Marc
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Marc Feeley wrote:
On 13-Oct-07, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
The Gambit wiki has regularly been the target of some random vandalism. Yesterday we hit a new high with over a dozen vandalized pages. I don't know what to think. Is someone getting any enjoyment out of this? Is it the result of some robot? In any case I can't continue wasting time repairing the vandalism. Anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this?
Marc
I've decided to restrict edit privileges to logged in users. Currently anyone can create an account. Let's see if that works.
Depending on what kind of vandalism is happening a bot may also be a solution. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot which does vandalism fighting on Wikipedia.
Marijn
- -- Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode
-
Guillaume Cartier -
Harold Ancell -
Marc Feeley -
Marijn Schouten (hkBst) -
Mario Domenech Goulart -
Raffael Cavallaro -
Stephane Le Cornec