Greg Stark wrote:
> I would assume it's some kind of affiliate system like the old
> clickfraud schemes. Ever wonder what those "make money from home"
> scammy ads were about? In the past they used to be pay-to-click
> schemes where you got paid to go around clicking on ads. I bet they've
> expanded to schemes where random people are paid for each link they
> manage to put up somewhere on the internet.
I guess it's possible.
We had a look at the kind of content that was being posted. One pattern
was that they posted a phone number hundreds or thousands of times in
different pages, with surrouding text stating that the number was the
support line for some home product (a laser printer, scanner, etc). No
URLs at all. The phone number was the valid number for some poor sod
who had no relationship at all to the product in question. (It wasn't a
single phone number, but it was a very limited amount of numbers. Maybe
a dozen, posted in thousands of fake pages, vandalized valid pages,
posted on user pages, and even on the comments for the wiki changes.)
What could be the profit model for posting such content? One theory was
that they were simply testing whether such a mass post could be done at
all, with an eye towards doing something more profitable in the future.
Another theory was that the number was for a person with whom someone
had some kind grudge, so they paid the attack group to piss them off.
--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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