What exploit allows Objects to spam Local Chat of avatars in other sims?

[Sling Trebuchet]

EDIT:

Anybody who paniced - calm down.

1) No exploit involved. The prims are simply sending IMs.
As they are objects, they don't appear as IMs from avatars. They turn up in the Local Chat of the target. No mystery. All normal stuff.

2) The apparent non-blockability seems to have been as Innula suggested. There would have been a major queue of incoming IMs existing at the time the senders were Blocked. They should have eventually flushed through.

 

The good news is as conatined in my original question.
The messages start with a 'sender' which is a link to the location of the object doing the abuse.
If that happens to be on land that the owner has left with build and no autoreturn, the landowner can be notified and the prims zapped.

End of edit  =============================================================================

I came across something very strange (to me) - tech-wise.

The target of the abuse reported that Local Chat 'was invisible'. They typed something. It appeared only for an instant above the chat bar. Incoming chat might flash or might never be visible.

The reason turn out to be that a set of objects was spamming them, with long strings of blanks/spaces. This resulted in really! rapid scrolling of text in chat history.

The characters at the start of each message were a link to the object ( and its owner) responsible.
This is where it gets strange. The objects were in another sim. Not even an adjacent sim. They were half-way across the grid.
The messages were not appearing as IMs. They appeared in Local Chat.

So off I went to look.

The perp had found some land with build on and zero autoreturn.
Up at 4000m they had rezzed what seemed to be a controller prim and 10 slaves prims.
The controller prim was invisible, but flagged its presence by the normal 'whirlwind' effect when an object is chatting. I assume that it was controlling the slave prims over a local channel.
All had different owners - but I assume they were all alts of one RL person.
Each prim in turn spammed the victim. I presume that this tecnique allowed a faster spam rate and couls also make it more difficult for the victim to block.

Now it gets really! really! strange.
Blocking the owners and/or the objects did not stop the spam.

The things and owners were ARed of course, but does anyone hold their breath these days?

Does anyone know what exploit the perps are using?

 

 

 

 

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I can think of a work-round for blocking the prims (I'm obviously not going to discuss it in public) but I'm surprised that blocking the owners didn't work.

Are you sure it actually didn't work, or could it be that there was such a long message queue from the 10 slave prims that it took a bit of time for the results of blocking their owners to become effective?

[Sling Trebuchet]

Perhaps you are correct. Those things were spewing, but the timestamps on the messages seem to post-date the blocking.

I found that very alarming.

 

But... there could have been a big queue.

A factor would be the stage at which blocking occurs - at the time of sending or in the receiving stage

 

I contacted the landowner, who zapped the prims and fixed his land settings.

No doubt the perp will find another parcel to base in, so when he stats spamming again, I'll arrange a test that might check if a long queue is the reason for apparent failure to block

 

Thanks