Warnings and Site Ban Theater

[showler]

I'm guessing it's some group that got into a bunch of old unused accounts and is spamming the same malicious links.

[TheVampireDante]

1 hour ago, showler said:

I'm guessing it's some group that got into a bunch of old unused accounts and is spamming the same malicious links.

New accounts, mix of bots and user behaviours, spamming in the hopes of the pages being around long enough to get search indexed so people searching for something on the site might get served their spam page.

Spammers riding our coattails in the hopes of getting more widespread opportunities.

[AlienSlof]

What do they actually gain from doing that, though?

[TheVampireDante]

Lot of people still just download things without checking, so someone searches for (to take a recent example) - a body mod for one of Cyberpunk 2077's NPCs, Panam.

There's been a few spam pages listing themselves as that sort of mod. So people search for it, find the spam page from a google search or something (if the page surived long enough to be indexed) and blindly just download what's on the page then open it up thinking it's safe.

That or follow a link on the page and download something from wherever that leads to without checking it's clean, which is equally as short-sighted, and potentially far more harmful to them.

Could be disruptive or destructive malware, data scrapers, keyloggers, remote takeover software, ransomware. Could be to gain access to their social media accounts to take them over, or see if there's financial data held on the system they can exploit.

Lot of options, just depends on what the spammer wants. To be a nuisnace, or try to widen their net to catch more computers for something (botnets) or simply just some form of extortion from the user(s) who fell for their crap.

Still a large amount of "hope someone falls for it" with spam, but the more they try, the higher chance they catch someone unprepared who falls for it.

Scumbags being scumbags as usual...