Cry for help, or weird spam?

November 16, 2011 11:19 AM

What is the story behind the text "My brother raped me last night" that has been posted to hundreds of apparently random online forums recently?

If you search Google for that string, you'll see that it has been posted to a huge number of forums (over 300) in the last 2 days, perhaps by code. It appears on websites in Arabic and other completely different scripts. (It turned up on my palindrome website, which is how I noticed it.) I get a lot of spammers posting ads as fake forum posts, but this has no apparent email or URL link. Of course, I'm concerned that it might be an obsessive anguished cry for help. Or is it some test for a future spam attack?

posted by msalt to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Wish I had an answer. I hadn't noticed this but ran the Google search. I limited it to a week to get 28 pages that begin 5 days ago. The text is copy/pasted or auto filled with identical content. The content is rather disturbing and is posted to forums that seem to be all of the place in topics. I could see it showing up in one or two communities that have nothing to do with dv/support etc. if this person was a community member and reaching out for help. But there is no way someone is a close member of over 20 communities :(.
posted by Librarygeek at 11:49 AM on November 16, 2011

Oh and random checking shows this person joined, posted the same day and has not returned. If it is a cry for help, wouldn't they be back?? I'm wondering about a weird spam test too. I mean people have to be complete dicks to suggest that this poor girl is spammer .... right?
posted by Librarygeek at 11:51 AM on November 16, 2011

Sounds like someone trolling forums with delicious copy pasta.
posted by utsutsu at 1:02 PM on November 16, 2011

I usually assume stuff like this is there to make something else on the internet harder to find.
posted by doteatop at 1:19 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]

If it's the text I'm thinking off (not searching to find out now at work), it's even older than that and has been around for at least a few years. I don't know what would be provoking this new wave, though, sorry.
posted by smoke at 3:04 PM on November 16, 2011

Somebody probably found a vulnerability in some common board software and chose something randomly offensive to inject. Script kiddie stuff, basically.
posted by dhartung at 5:10 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

Are the other forums picking it up reputable? There are a million forum scrapers and so it wouldn't shock me to find it posted in one or two places, and then just scraped across the whole damn web.
posted by Elminster24 at 9:01 PM on November 16, 2011

The odd thing is I was seeing some really niche small time forums. That, more than anything, led
me to WTF? I mean blackfantasyland forums, age of empires, lostteam-yugiohgames-anime, there is a larger twilite fans forum in there. There is a spanish forum and another language I can't identify off hand.
I think the script kiddies playing is probably right.
posted by Librarygeek at 9:46 PM on November 16, 2011

Response by poster: Assuming it is script kiddie stuff, how might I configure my (Drupal) forum to prevent this? I have email verification but clearly it's not doing the trick.
posted by msalt at 2:35 PM on November 17, 2011

Well, if its a bot or something, you can test using a captcha. May have some impact on usage, but generally folks who really want in will find a way. Of course, it goes the other way too and if this is a manual spam thing, then they can fill out the captcha.
posted by Elminster24 at 8:00 PM on November 17, 2011