Whoa what happened?

[CrystalWizard]

what is going on with the quickbook, airlines, and the rest?

[planetearth]

what is going on with the quickbook, airlines, and the rest?

Spammers getting through the site's sign-up requirements and Cloudflare's "please wait while we verify that you're human" hoops.

Steve

[Gamma-UT]

I think Cloudflare might be having some more problems and it's led to whatever spam-checker this site uses to cr*p out.

[aMUSEd]

What is the point of this sort of spam? No one is going to click on any of their links or use their fake phone numbers - all they do is piss people off, stop forums from functioning, make a lot of work for admins and impact on the site's finances.

[sqigls]

botdangerwarning.jpg

[planetearth]

What is the point of this sort of spam? No one is going to click on any of their links or use their fake phone numbers - all they do is piss people off, stop forums from functioning, make a lot of work for admins and impact on the site's finances.

I agree with you, but I think the problem is that we see all the affected forums at the same time. I think the attacker was only supposed to hit one or two forums so that it wasn’t extremely obvious the site was under attack. I think they should also have hit during the busiest part of the day (or near it), so that any other posts left here as part of the attack wouldn’t all be listed as the latest messagein each forum.

However, even if they get closer to getting these messages to appear only once in one forum, the content of the messages themselves are ridiculously out of place on this site. So, yeah…it’s all fairly hopeless for these idiots.

Steve

[BertKoor]

What is the point of this sort of spam?

These topics are not meant to be read by humans directly, they serve as food for other bots & spiders. KvrAudio is highly ranked in search engines. If they manage to put fake info here, then it will be put in the "AI Overview" without providing any source. People genuinely querying for contact info of these businesses will get the wrong number and will be potential fraud victims.

[aMUSEd]

I doubt the aim was to just hit one of two forums though, this looks very much like a blanket bombing approach where the rate of posts is one every few seconds, multiple hits in multiple forums so as to outpace any genuine posts and keep their shit at the top of the page. But it does seem pointless and I would have thought doesn't even help the companies products they are ostensively promoting - instead it probably does reputational damage to genuine companies like Quickbooks etc. I realise this is all AI and bots but there must be some aim or driver behind this, maybe it's really just malicious, I can't see how they benefit economically.

[aMUSEd]

What is the point of this sort of spam?

These topics are not meant to be read by humans directly, they serve as food for other bots & spiders. KvrAudio is highly ranked in search engines. If they manage to put fake info here, then it will be put in the "AI Overview" without providing any source. People genuinely querying for contact info of these businesses will get the wrong number and will be potential fraud victims.

OK that actually makes more sense - thanks

[Gamma-UT]

]I agree with you, but I think the problem is that we see all the affected forums at the same time. I think the attacker was only supposed to hit one or two forums so that it wasn’t extremely obvious the site was under attack. I think they should also have hit during the busiest part of the day (or near it), so that any other posts left here as part of the attack wouldn’t all be listed as the latest messagein each forum.

Spamming is pretty heavily automated and if a filter fails they all get through instead of a couple that an admin might miss.

[BertKoor]

@Mod_on_duty: thx 4 cleaning up the big mess!

[CrystalWizard]

[Shabdahbriah]

What is the point of this sort of spam?

These topics are not meant to be read by humans directly, they serve as food for other bots & spiders. KvrAudio is highly ranked in search engines. If they manage to put fake info here, then it will be put in the "AI Overview" without providing any source. People genuinely querying for contact info of these businesses will get the wrong number and will be potential fraud victims.

That's very interesting, thank you.