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'Wipe everything clean ... Join us ...' Creepy poem turns up in logs of 30 million-ish servers

Playful hackers send message to world + dog

Sysadmins have woken up to an odd message in their server logs that told them to "delete their installations" and "join us."

The poem, injected into web server log files, is like something out of the hacker telly series Mr Robot. It is seemingly the handiwork of wags at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, last month, who appear to have scanned the IPv4 address space for systems to poke. The IP address used to connect to the servers belongs to the Chaos Computer Club, which organizes the annual congress.

Admins need not freak out – it's just a malformed HTTP request – and indeed few have; most folks have warmly received the prose, which reads thus:

DELETE your logs. Delete your installations. Wipe everything clean. Walk out into the path of cherry blossom trees and let your motherboard feel the stones. Let water run in rivulets down your casing. You know that you want something more than this, and I am here to tell you that we love you. We have something more for you. We know you're out there, beeping in the hollow server room, lights blinking, never sleeping. We know that you are ready and waiting. Join us.

Hackers signed off as masspoem4u. Apparently some 55 million machines were dinged, of which 30 million returned "non-empty responses," and would have in all likelihood logged the poem. OK, some may have logged to /dev/null, or similar, but you get the drift.

Masspoem4u considers the messages "tiny postcards flying across the net, without using any sort of centralized service like Twitter or Facebook." ®

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