What’s the purpose of cloning a website like this? Is the idea to add links to other sites that get ranked marginally higher if the fake site gets popular? Because even if you cloned 1000 websites, I can’t imagine it making a big difference.
Pure speculation, this could be part of a North Korean job seeking program where they masquerade as the original blogger. They can use the copied site as proof they're a real person. Or it's part of a long-con social engineering project.
They could put out a legit-looking blog post that has a malicious GitHub command that installs malware, and social engineer someone into running it.
> It's hosted with Cloudflare, and the abuse reporting form they insist you use straight-up doesn't work. Click "Submit an abuse report" and it'll take you to a completely blank page. Very encouraging.
The page is truly blank = the view source page shows absolutely nothing
So I turned of uBlock origin and tried again
> Sorry, you have been blocked
> You are unable to access abuse.cloudflare.com
The CEO (or ex-CEO?) of Cloudflare is an HN native. He should be able to help.
What’s the purpose of cloning a website like this? Is the idea to add links to other sites that get ranked marginally higher if the fake site gets popular? Because even if you cloned 1000 websites, I can’t imagine it making a big difference.
Pure speculation, this could be part of a North Korean job seeking program where they masquerade as the original blogger. They can use the copied site as proof they're a real person. Or it's part of a long-con social engineering project.
They could put out a legit-looking blog post that has a malicious GitHub command that installs malware, and social engineer someone into running it.
> It should be obvious this isn't a high-value website.
Ah, but every time I've seen your blog, it was on the front page of Hacker News!
Are you sure it was the original, or a clone?
Agreed. 100% of the times I've seen your blog it was on the front page!
....sample size one.
You couldn't make this up.
> It's hosted with Cloudflare, and the abuse reporting form they insist you use straight-up doesn't work. Click "Submit an abuse report" and it'll take you to a completely blank page. Very encouraging.
The page is truly blank = the view source page shows absolutely nothing
So I turned of uBlock origin and tried again
> Sorry, you have been blocked > You are unable to access abuse.cloudflare.com
.. you've been blocked. That's not what the page shows (a form.. like the article says). After submit there's no "message received" type page.