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> Were they hoping to get non-tech-savvy people that were searching for computer help? Yes. They would create this posts and get quickly on search results (Th

> Were they hoping to get non-tech-savvy people that were searching for computer help? Yes. They would create this posts and get quickly on search results (The platform is pretty good for making SEO optimization out of the box) and they would write good quality posts as well. They would also share this posts on some other websites, especially social media accounts. We don't have Google analytics or such to see where exactly they would come from. I noticed huge traffic to such pages by looking at the logs. Our nginx log parser was alerting us about sudden spike on certain blogs and pre-defined list of words we have. That's when we noticed something is going on. Didn't take more than couple of hours (while working on the model) that we receive email from data center people about hosting phishing content, again didn't take much longer we received emails from some of those companies as well. > Were they embedding malware into your blogging platform, or getting ad revenue out of this somehow? No. On the blogging platform, we have everything bleached out, nothing would go in without passing through sanitizers. They would simply had people convinced to call those US numbers. I actually called one of those numbers and yeah, it was one of those customer supports some other part of the planet earth and definitely not from the company he was pretending to be and very quickly asked me to install team viewer on my machine. I really wanted to let them access it via the windows on my virtual box and have some fun with them, but well, someone had to fix the moderation issue :D

pier25 5y ago
Why didn't you ban the user when you found out the scam?
- Alir3z4 5y ago
  We did. We banned, shadow banned, deleted, recorded and many other things to them to make sure they're not reaching their goal. The problem was, it wasn't a single user to deal with. thousands and thousands with no stop. Flooding the platform like zombie apocalypse.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Jesus... what a nightmare. Were these all using your free plans?
    - Alir3z4 5y ago
      Oh yes. Never ending. We still keep the free plans even through there are abusers, but that won't be a reason to retire it. So many people using for legitimate reasons and keeping their personal writing there. It's unfortunate, but well, it happens.
      - pier25 5y ago
        Why do you think they were using your platform to do this? Is it because these scammers were non technical? Or maybe the anonymity provided by your platform?
        Alir3z4 5y ago
        2 theories 1. Highly technical, because the flow was scripted to work with our website. Bypassing captcha, email verification by using many different domains, email accounts and also highly distributed via many ips. 2. Non technical. Where they paid some ppl to do it manually, which doesn't seems to be due to the way they walk through many steps like piece of cake. However, our platform was/is a target due to several reasons: 1. Easy to register and start blogging. 2. Free plan with no hard limit. 3. Quick rankings due to SEO implementation out of the box. 4. Absence of any moderation before such attack. And probably some other possible reasons that made their job easier and us a better target.
        NineStarPoint 5y ago
        If I was this sort of scammer, I’d have the text being posted and progression of how hard it is to figure out pretty well ironed down. Then you just try it on lots of platforms to find the ones that don’t figure out how to solve the issue. So my guess would be they tried because they might as well, and then they hit the limit of how much effort they had put into their own generation systems and moved on to the next mark.

pier25 5y ago

Why didn't you ban the user when you found out the scam?

Alir3z4 5y ago
We did. We banned, shadow banned, deleted, recorded and many other things to them to make sure they're not reaching their goal. The problem was, it wasn't a single user to deal with. thousands and thousands with no stop. Flooding the platform like zombie apocalypse.
- pier25 5y ago
  Jesus... what a nightmare. Were these all using your free plans?
  - Alir3z4 5y ago
    Oh yes. Never ending. We still keep the free plans even through there are abusers, but that won't be a reason to retire it. So many people using for legitimate reasons and keeping their personal writing there. It's unfortunate, but well, it happens.
    - pier25 5y ago
      Why do you think they were using your platform to do this? Is it because these scammers were non technical? Or maybe the anonymity provided by your platform?
      - Alir3z4 5y ago
        2 theories 1. Highly technical, because the flow was scripted to work with our website. Bypassing captcha, email verification by using many different domains, email accounts and also highly distributed via many ips. 2. Non technical. Where they paid some ppl to do it manually, which doesn't seems to be due to the way they walk through many steps like piece of cake. However, our platform was/is a target due to several reasons: 1. Easy to register and start blogging. 2. Free plan with no hard limit. 3. Quick rankings due to SEO implementation out of the box. 4. Absence of any moderation before such attack. And probably some other possible reasons that made their job easier and us a better target.
      - NineStarPoint 5y ago
        If I was this sort of scammer, I’d have the text being posted and progression of how hard it is to figure out pretty well ironed down. Then you just try it on lots of platforms to find the ones that don’t figure out how to solve the issue. So my guess would be they tried because they might as well, and then they hit the limit of how much effort they had put into their own generation systems and moved on to the next mark.