From what the moderation tools indicate, Willie (or rather, whoever handled his account at the time) is the one that set all of the last 24 hours' events in motion, by removing Rip, adding good-jelly, and deleting his own account. This then led to them inviting more-spite, who then invited a few members, including myself.
We then sent an invite to Rip, which he should see in the morning when he wakes up.
It's a weird timeline of events, but we'll hold the fort regardless.
by whimsiethefluff
7 Comments
This is all baffling. Thanks for sharing what you know!
So old mate got hacked and now we have 5 random chucklefucks instead
The sub will not die, it’s in good hands!!
Thank you. Maybe Willie can tell us what happened over on the Bike Forums thread:
[https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/1307400-r-xbiking-hostile-takeover-discussion-thread.html](https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/1307400-r-xbiking-hostile-takeover-discussion-thread.html)
Some interesting hints there that seem to be missed, like whats up with the random mods that where added and removed, these seem to be real accounts:
III-Society-8480
and
First_Cow_2297
I think it goes something like this:
-Guys were running automated programs or whatever, credential stuffing, like they bought a bunch of emails, usernames and passwords taken from website breaches in the past from some hacker site, and started firing them at reddit with bots or LLMs, whatever.
-U/OldSchoolWillie was compromised via email/username/password duplication by reusing a password for reddit that had been compromised elsewhere, meaning that the automated attack worked and these guys then invited themselves in to r/xbiking as Willie, before giving up mod rights, removing RipVanBinkle, deleting the Willie account and leaving the two new guys in charge. That would explain several things, in that they’re not lying when they say they were invited in by a Mod, it’s just that they were impersonating that Mod through a compromised password/email or username combo from their massive auomated list. It also neatly explains several legitimate questions some guy in mod support had about the whole situation.
-I think the scammer crew were suddenly the dog that caught the car and they realized that things weren’t going to go their way, so they’re going to try to brazen it out as innocent guys who made accounts today, only to be immediately invited in as mods by the guy they sicced their bots on and were chasing across reddit, frantically trying to do damage control before things got out of hand and the message got out. But too late, things got out of hand (thanks r/bicycling mods) and the message got out, so now they’re trying to soothe ruffled feathers and drift away quietly to some much less popular subreddit to turn into an IPTV spam hub. There were a bunch of them compromised, but all in tiny niche subreddits.
-The sub’s ~~safely back in the hands of legit bikefreak users~~, because tweedledumb and tweedledumber bit off more than they could chew and suddenly wanted nothing more to do with it, because it suddenly got too big for them to handle and people were about to pay some serious attention to them.
-Edit: The sub’s now not back in the hands of legit users. Tweedledumber got cold feet, invited normal old bikefreaks in as mods, until Tweedledum pulled rank, deleted the normal bikefreak mods as well as Tweedledumber and has gone to the matresses. Stay tuned!
I don’t really understand how the appointment of u/Good-Jelly9541 & u/MoreSpite4193 are genuine mods as both their accounts have been created in the last 24hrs. Can we remove them?
If we need more mods I’m happy to be involved.