I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#2Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Wish you had made it into an actual honeypot though!
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#3Such an interesting read.
I prompts me to wonder whether abuse was one reason that Heroku removed their beloved (among students) free tier.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#4Such an interesting read. I prompts me to wonder whether abuse was one reason that Heroku removed their beloved (among students) free tier.
Most likely. We see a large amount of abuse coming from the replit free tier. And that's pretty similar to what Heroku used to offer.
If you're going to provide people with free compute online, there are just a lot of ways to exploit that.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#5Such an interesting read. I prompts me to wonder whether abuse was one reason that Heroku removed their beloved (among students) free tier.
I was shocked that even with the free tier gone, there's still some level of abuse. Even the paywall doesn't totally cure the problem.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#6honeypot indicates some sort of intention to do it, but as the post states, they don't want any of it
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#7this is the second time I'm seeing someone point out Replit being used for obvious phishing and I'm pretty sure I've even seen it myself before
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#8Is there a name for this phenomenon? It's sort of like the dark forest, but not exactly. As soon as a free service becomes discovered, it is immediately swamped by scammers and spammers.
Many many years ago I ran a small forum for a small webcomic, and one day it was just full of low effort scams and spam. For an audience of, I dunno, a dozen people? I just shut the whole thing down because it wasn't worth our time to do anything about it.
We just can't have nice things, and if you run across something that is actually nice, make sure to thank whoever runs it for all their behind the scenes effort to deal with the scumbags that clog everything, and I mean everything, up with s(p|c)am.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#9This is a great writeup. If you are just looking to deter scammers I bet $1 would have the same affect. I don't think scammers are worried about the price as much as having to give any amount of information to you. I could be wrong though as I am not a scammer!
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#10PSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Disadvantages
(Also note the difference between the length of the "Advantages" and "Disadvantages" sections)