(no subject)

[telophase]

More information on the LJ community hackers. Short version: Hotmail recycles addresses, hackers gain entry into Hotmail, then gain entry to LJ and change your password and lock you out of your own journal. If you ever used a Hotmail address to sign up for LJ, then go into Email mangement and delete it. It's good practice to go in and clean off your old addresses as well.

ETA; Also? The journals written in Cyrillic that keep friending people? Bots. Nobody's quite sure what they do. I probably don't have to tell you this, but do not friend them back.

Comments

[trobadora]

And if one of those bots friends you it's probably a good idea to report them. LJ's got a page for that: http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml

[chisotahn]

The Hotmail recycling thing is used a lot; I see it frequently used to 'hack' Gaia accounts as well. Siiigh.

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

I remember some bots that cut and pasted entries from one of my friends' public lj entries for their blogspot journal. Complete with recopied comments (albiet from random members called 'cjscdkjs' and 'fhjuuynm').

The only thing I was able to figure out was that is was a ploy to get money from ads on their blogs. Maybe they thought it was the same here.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The thing that prompted me to add the CAPTCHA to non-friend journals was a spambot that posted snippets of other journals and comments that had some sort of relevance to the post which I got into an argument with before I realized it was a bot. I wonder if they're doing that? Following back to the comment bots' LJ pages found one entry in each full of spam links, so I suppose it's to Googlebomb the links?

[gweneiriol.livejournal.com]

While putting together this week's origslash_news, I saw info on a new way hackers are using LJ to spread viruses, see here: http://community.livejournal.com/yaoi/2245431.html.