In looking over recent web spam activity, we have noted two trends. Abusing functionality of popular web software and doing that with websites from major universes. So another element of this isn’t surprising. Spammers are adding spam pages to websites running MediaWiki from major universities.
Here are the latest pages added to a Harvard hosted MediaWiki website:
And here are the latest pages added on a University of California, San Diego hosted MediaWiki website:
Both of those websites are running MediaWiki 1.16, which was only supported through November 2011. So these websites look to have long ago stopped being maintained.
MediaWiki provides various ways to restrict access to editing, which can prevent old websites from being overrun with spam like this when they are no longer actively intentionally edited.
If you have a website that has web spam content placed on it, we can help you to get it cleaned up and hardened to avoid additional issues.