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I am once again getting a wave of right-wing spam SMSes from Hillsdale College (purportedly). Are they actually letting their institution’s name be attached to political spam? I realize there are all kinds of super gross things about Hillsdale as an institution, but even so, I’d think the institution would want to preserve some shred of self-respect, or at least try to keep up appearances.
The spam links are all the domain rght.io followed by 6-character alphanumeric codes, such as:
http://rght.io/jjne75
http://rght.io/ip0l3b
http://rght.io/646anh
http://rght.io/aem0ai
http://rght.io/8gplnp
http://rght.io/mncl8i
http://rght.io/eo556l
http://rght.io/15bk46
http://rght.io/igd8ga
http://rght.io/pp2ggf
(Those are random examples, I don’t want them validating my number; I just want to send the typical Fedi server traffic their way.)
I haven’t investigated the domain, server, etc. at all, but if anyone is inspired…have at it!
@inthehands I'm getting 302-redirected to not-found.domain.
I'm guessing if you put in the actual links they sent you, you'd get redirected elsewhere. Sketchy as hell.
@leon_p_smith
Guess we’d better try all the combinations then!
@inthehands Yeah I don't know what their kind of saturation of the space might be, to estimate how many URLs you'd have to try to have a reasonable chance of finding one that does something other than try to fake the non-existence of the domain.
Waaayyy more effort than what I'm willing to try, though.
@inthehands But like, that's presumably less than 2.2 billion URLS to try, so it would be doable, at least if you do it slowly with a distributed indexer.
On the other hand, this feels like a fairly low-effort redirector site, so the chance might be good that you could just crawl it over the course of a few days from a small number of computers. Though if I were ethically compromised enough to build such a site, I'd probably try to identify scrapers and replace active URLs with redirects.
And... assuming they are sending a unique code upon every SMS text, you shouldn't have to go looking for long before you find something interesting. I'd guess you wouldn't need more than a few hundred URLs, tops.
Of course, they could recycle their URLs and replace them with sketchy redirects after some period of time, say a week or three, which means the number of active URLs could be much closer to their recent spam activity. In that case, I'd guess you might have to try a few thousand URLs before you find one that is interesting.