During the last two days it seems we have been “bombarded” with advertisement bots.
I found it curious, the advertisements are correctly targeted to sysadmins and security professionals. Meanwhile they have somewhat believable biographies (even if they are a little on the nose), suggesting hand crafted accounts.
Something they all have in common is their instance (discuss.tchncs.de) and that they have a “bachelors degree in computer science”.
This is not the first time I’ve seen adbots on Lemmy, but it’s the first time I’ve seen them on infosec.
Does anyone have any insight into the world of adbots they could share? I find myself increasingly curious in what goes on behind the curtains.
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
I can’t speak specifically to the infosec bots, but I suspect it has something to do with all of the Lemmy instances mirroring every post. It could add a lot of weight to SEO for a various websites. So if they can get a post that doesn’t get deleted, that’s SEO fodder
Deebster@lemmyrs.org 1 year ago
Seems like Lemmy should add a
rel=canonicallink when browsing federated communities - this would solve this issue (and would be the correct thing to do anyway).jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
I believe Lemmy instances disallow crawling by default, so SEO is probably not why. Would be nice to find Lemmy results in Google if they can sort out the canonical URL problem. Reddit was a great resource for random questions, and if people move here it should still be easy to find.
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Also, one can create a personal instance of lemmy without users, create a bot to subscribe to many communities and they’d end up with a whole database to simply create personalized recommenders targeted to every single user.
bulwark@infosec.pub 1 year ago
The SEO-angle is interesting, thank you for the insight!