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We seem to be under an attack from a Korean spamming group. They make a post about every 3 minutes, which gets deleted through flag as spam in less than 1 minute.

Is there a way to stop this at all? Maybe something the mods can do?

Here's such post: https://superuser.com/questions/1488744 (one of the many)

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    The messages are in Korean, for what it's worth.
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:34
  • 1
    Ah indeed. They're Korean.
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:36
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    That link stopped working already, but metasmoke is collecting an archive of them as they arrive. Here is a similar one: metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/201007
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:39
  • @tripleee weird, I can still see it if I click the link. It'll tell me the post has been deleted, but I can still see it through the revision history. Anyway, it seems the attack has stopped now.
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 13:52
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    If you have enough rep you can see deleted posts, but most of us can't
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 14:45
  • Ah, forgot about that. :D
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 14:47
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    "Ah indeed. They're Korean" North or South?
    – Moab
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 14:37
  • Do they use different Korean characters @Moab? I just mistaken the language for chinese when it clearly was Korean.
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 14:54
  • It was an attempt at humor, like it would make a difference anyway, I assume it is South, North would be doing something more nefarious on this site.
    – Moab
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 14:57
  • Hahahaha @Moab you got me. :) good job. :D
    – LPChip
    Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 18:34
  • Sudden influx of Korean spam
    – phuclv
    Commented Sep 1, 2020 at 1:51

2 Answers 2

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I'll try to keep an eye out. The community team is aware and I know they have a very special spanner for throwing into the works here

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It's not just this site; MathOverflow, Stack Apps and Ask Ubuntu are under attack as well. Here is a list of those posts. SmokeDetector will cast four spam flags on all these posts (so only two by 'real' users are necessary to destroy the spam), but unfortunately it has a bit of a backlog right now so it might take a while to kick in.

♦ moderators can't do much other than flagging as spam as well; the Community Team can temporarily disable posting by unregistered accounts (though that doesn't help right now, as @Kulfy correctly notes) or try something else. Unfortunately, they have another far bigger problem at their hands at the moment, but I'll try to reach them about this.

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  • The link is just to recent posts, maybe link to a slice from a specific time period?
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:44
  • I don't think disabling "anonymous" write access would be fruitful. Sites such as Ask Ubuntu require registration for posting.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:54
  • Ah, you're right. The last spam wave I've seen was conducted by unregistered accounts, that's why I was suggesting that. But the Community Managers do have other tools at their disposal.
    – Glorfindel
    Commented Oct 3, 2019 at 11:56
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    For those trying to reconstruct the event, it started with metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/200985 (currently on page 2 of the metasmoke search results for this particular reason) and ended with metasmoke.erwaysoftware.com/post/201177 (still the first result for the search) for a total of 92 posts promoting 16 distinct domains in .net and .com with a link obfuscation using a comma and whitespace.
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 6, 2019 at 12:55

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