this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Nicole [LOCKED]
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Due to recent developments, we've had to lock down this community until further notice. For more information, please take a look at this post: https://feddit.org/post/10515288
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First time for me happened last night. Posted it here already, but for the sake of compiling information I'll repeat it here. I run a DNS whitelist firewall and logged a blocked address
https://cdn-discuss-online.s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com/upon opening Lemmy with the message notification. LW cached and served the image for me when the connection to this link was unavailable. I cannot say anything further about what is happening in this connection. I can only confirm that it exists. The moment I saw the message I checked my logs and am certain that this is correlated.@[email protected] @[email protected]
Since y’all are both much more technically literate than me, could I ask one of you to take a look at what’s going on with embedded images from the Nicole spam seemingly loading trackers? Is this something Blahaj users should worry about or take steps to deal with?
I'm not sure it's really worth worrying about ?
My understanding is, they can PM you with a code in the url like xyz123.jpg and then when your browser loads that image they will know normal web server stuff about your browser and device. It's the same information you share with every website you visit.
They can't load a tracker in your browser and follow you around the web.
Thanks for the reply, I guess I’m just paranoid about what anyone could do with that information given the political climate in the US right now. I don’t say anything on here that I wouldn’t be fine having read off in court anyway, but a lot of people here do not seem to have the same inhibition, so guilt by association is a worry of mine. Probably unrealistic, but I’d rather be a little paranoid now than extremely sorry in the future.
It's good to have a healthy level of concern.
Sometimes it's hard to know what's healthy and what's excessive.
They can link your lemmy account to your ip address which isn't ideal
I'm no expert. In life I am very much a knockoff swiss army knife. I can technically do a lot, but I am the shittiest pair of scissors ever made.
I dislike how obtuse networking stuff can seem. I run a whitelist firewall because it is the easy way to control exactly what I connect to my computer. I have written bad code and will continue to do so. I download sketchy stuff some times, but it cannot escape. Telemetry stuff all gets blocked too.
It is a pain in the ass to initially setup and maintain a DNS whitelist. It must be on a third party device or you'll need to be super meticulous about how your system is setup. Lots of packages can and do try to bypass a local firewall on the same device they run on. I have to log in and add addresses and ports manually for everything I visit. Still, I can let an AI write code I barely understand and run it knowing it cannot escape. Scripting and configuring your own whitelist setup on a device is not fun. Once option that is reasonable and fairly easy is PC WRT. That is a small business commercial version of OpenWRT. It is just an Asian guy in Texas, but his stuff works pretty well and he maintains it long term. I modify all of my routers to add an external USB to TTL serial module to the port on the PCB. For most routers, the internal UART serial port gives access to the bootloader and OS in ways that are nearly impossible to hide what is happening. I've screwed around with PC WRT stuff a good bit and it seems legit. If you are really concerned about aquariums for sharks, this will get you an interface for Open VPN, all the adblock options, and most add on features people configure in OpenWRT.
Ultimately, such a DNS filter is your digital front door to your home. If you run adblock, someone else is closing your front door to old familiar bad actors only. With a white list, I'm only opening my door to those I wish to enter.
It is pretty clear that Nicole is not what they appear to present. It is fishing. If they were relevant they would not spam. The main litmus test for anyone is if they have a diverse and mostly positive post and comment history. Anyone that has a monolithic presence in any one space is fake or potentially dangerous.
In the short term, you can use a client that doesn't load inline images in DMs. Our tesseract front end is one such client if you're using a browser.
Thanks for the reply! I’ll check out tesseract.
We get one "Suspicious" by Trustwave on Virustotal for that.
What does this mean for people who have received these messages? Should I be worried just about having loaded the image by opening my lemmy messages?
I know as much as you do.