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.
Nope, it’s allowed.
The default robots.txt disallows access to a few paths but not /post or /comment.
There are lots of crawler bots hitting my instance (ByteSpider being the most aggressive). I just have a list of User Agent regexes I use to block them via Nginx. Some, like Semrush, have IP ranges I can block completely at the firewall (in addition to the UA filters)