MediaWiki Fratman Skin

MediaWiki is a free application, registered under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is used to run Wikipedia, the World’s largest online encyclopedia, as well as many other wikis. Fratman is a minimalist skin for MediaWiki-driven websites. Originally developed by Jason Pearce, users began making enhancements and fixing bugs. To better facilitate community-driven development …

Network Solutions Phishing & Spam

For three months one of my email accounts has been receiving unwanted Network Solutions emails sent from servers other than *.networksolutions.com. The emails come from or contain links to *.ed10.com, *.ed4.net, and *.ed10.net. These domains are not registered to Network Solutions. In March I wrote about “Symantec Phishing,” and Network Solution’s emails bear a striking …

Comment Spam and Adobe Redirect

While sifting through some of my site’s comment spam, I noticed a clever trick one spammer used in an attempt to fool my website’s defenses. Instead of directly linking back to their site, they posted links that take advantage of an Adobe redirect script. For example, instead of linking to https://spam.com/, they linked to https://store.adobe.com/cgi-bin/redirect/?https://spam.com/. …

Wiki Spam Without Style

Wiki spam is when users or bots append unwanted links and URLs into established or abandoned wiki-based websites. Though most wiki software like MediaWiki automatically adds the attribute/value rel=”nofollow” to a tags, spammers still flood your content in an effort to peddle there wares. Most wiki spam uses CSS to hide their content from the …