There have been a number of comment spam attacks in various posts in a couple of /c’s that I follow by a user/individual who uses account names like Thulean*
For example: ThuleanSneed@lemmy.tf in !coffee@lemmy.world
and ThuleanPerspective2@eviltoast.org in !anime@ani.social
edit: Also ThuleanSneed@startrek.website in !startrek@startrek.website
The posts have been removed or deleted by the respective /c’s mods, and the offending accounts banned, but you can see the traces of them in those /c’s modlogs.
The comments consist of an all-caps string of words with profanities, and Simpsons memes.
An attack on a post may consist of several repeated or similar looking comments.
This looks like a bored teenager prank, but it may also be an organization testing Lemmy’s systemic and collective defenses and ability to respond against spam and bot posts.
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This user is just the latest in a series of spammers since Lemmy has grown in popularity. It’s hard to tell if they have some vendetta against the platform or are just maladjusted and want to annoy people having a good time.
As someone who posts across Lemmy a lot, I am usually made aware of the spammers almost immediately, because my inbox will be full of the same spam comment replies all at once. I just report them up to the various instances when I see it.
It’s hard to tell if they have some vendetta against the platform or are just maladjusted and want to annoy people having a good time.
Cynical tinfoil hat theory: there’s now a financial incentive to harm alternatives to a certain website that recently had their IPO. The timing does kind of fit, at least.
I saw these a few days ago and they reminded me that I am a moderator of a sleepy little community. 😆
Thankfully the mod tools were very effective in banning the user and nuking comments.
Of note about this is that image links in comments aren’t rehosted by Lemmy. That means it would be possible to flood a community with images hosted by a friendly or compromised server, and gather a lot of information about who was reading that community (how many people, and all their IP address and browser fingerprint information, to start with) by what image requests were coming in kicked off by people seeing your spam.
I didn’t look at the image spam in detail, but if I’m remembering right the little bit of it I looked at, it had images hosted by lemmygrad.ml (which makes sense) and czchan.org (which makes less sense). It could be that after uploading the first two images to Lemmygrad they realized they could just type the Markdown for the original hosting source for the remaining three, of course.
It would also be possible to use this type of flood posting as a smokescreen for a more targeted plan of sending malware-infected images, or more specifically targeted let’s-track-who-requests-this-image-file images, to a more limited set of recipients.
Just my paranoid thoughts on the situation.
Image rendering attacks and download tracking are well known, so it’s not paranoid at all.
Yep.
There are two big end-user security decisions that are totally mystifying to me about Lemmy. One is automatically embedding images in comments without rehosting the images, and the other is failing to warn people that their upvotes and downvotes are not actually private.
I’m not trying to sit in judgement of someone who’s writing free software but to me those are both negligent software design from an end-user privacy perspective.
And the simpsons memes aren’t even good, jokes aside maybe something like X comments or posts under X time automatically suspends user tool could help ?
Noticed this before, it’s quite annoying.
A lot of this stems from instances running old versions with loose registration requirements, like no captcha. This is a problem in a federated system because there’s no barrier for a banned user to just jump to another instance.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if, when Lemmy has anti-spam measures implemented like rate-limiting and captchas for registration, it disabled federation with instances that are at a lower version, to motivate small instances to upgrade and enable the new features.
What I really want to see is the ability to set a threshold for a server to reach before it will federate.
Example: you have a server, you don’t allow others to federate unless those servers force captcha or approval of user registration
The problem is that a server could very easily lie and claim to have captchas when it really doesnt.
You wrote usernames as email addresses. You should have put /u/ in front to make links. You can also use @, however that will send a metion notification to the user.
Also FYI I think lemm.ee has some automation that blocks these. I don’t ever seem to get them, yet when I check other instances I can see them. Either that, or our admin are just hot on this stuff and ban them early on - both of these users were banned 3-4 days ago.
lemmy.tf seems to be a problem instance, it’s still running v0.19.0 and doesn’t have captcha for sign ups.
Don’t they have something better to do with their time than posting on lemmy all day? … … … [drags on water bottle]
