[ckan-discuss] Spam on the data hub

Wed Aug 8 19:18:55 BST 2012

I've made as many changes as we can with the basic heuristics we came up with - some users look like real users, unfortunately there are still a hundred or so datasets that could be marked as deleted. I'm going to script this up so I can mark things as ready for deletion.

Ross.

On 8 Aug 2012, at 17:25, Richard Cyganiak wrote:

> On 7 Aug 2012, at 19:30, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>> Looks like there was another big spam attack on the Data Hub a couple of days ago. There are some 2000 spam datasets. Look at the revision list, circa pages 16 to 121. Looks like it all happened between August 1 and August 3.
>> 
>> We discovered it Friday morning and after various unsuccessful
>> attempts to block shut it down Friday evening.
>> 
>>> I started cleaning some of it up, but had to give up when I realized just how much it is.
>> 
>> Yes :-/
>> 
>>> The user names and dataset IDs follow a predictable pattern, so I guess someone with access to the backend could script something to clean this up?
>> 
>> Exactly. We're working on this and it should be gone in the next day or so.
> 
> Ok. Looks like it's still there, but good to hear you're working on it.
> 
>> I think the only real solution is vigilance and dealing quick with bad
>> attacks like this one as quickly as possible when they happen.
> 
> A good first step would be to automatically log all edits to an IRC channel, and ensure that some people with sysadmin privileges actually hang out there.
> 
> Best,
> Richard
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