HRWiki talk:NSMC vandal
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Umm, what is this page about? Can someone explain? H * R 7 0 0
- It's a list of all the usernames that went on the latest vandalism rampage through the wiki, collected for the convenience of the sysops to go through and block them all (which has been done, hence the ticks). --phlip TC 17:01, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Should we really have all these useless links here? SaltyTalk! 01:08, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Explanation
NSMC is a vandalbot that has caused widespread damage to several wikis. Its method of operation exploits various access points available to anonymous users. As a result, these access points were temporarily disabled. In its first attack, it anonymously and randomly vandalized by replacing their contents with "N— stole my bike" and later "N— stole my cow". To avoid being blocked, the bot uses a vast amount of Internet proxies so that it can appear to originate from hundreds of IP addresses. The number of pages affected was in such a small amount of time that it created a denial of service. Later, when anonymous editing had been disabled, the bot created hundreds of random usernames with "NSMC" plus a number, each with one edit, so new-user registration was taken offline. After the knowledge base was hit, then it moved to the Fanstuff. The usernames eventually became just random numbers approximately 20 characters in length, and the content of the vandalism changed from something static that we could search for to various bits of actual content. In the latest attack, the "email new password" feature of the user login page was abused, sending thousands of emails to various users. The identity of the vandal is not currently known, nor is the motive.
[edit] Hey.
The page is bloke. Halp pl0x?