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A question was asked by a new user two hours ago asking if the strange SMS he received was evidence of the DoD attacking him (the message was of an IP address which is linked to the DoD, along with a port and some random identifier text). In these last two hours, five non-answer questions saying that it's happening to them too have arrived. What could possibly explain this behavior? I am guessing they are all the same person trying to joke around or perhaps trying to make the question get more attention, but I still don't get what the motive could possibly be. They don't appear to be serially upvoting the questioner or the other questions...

The question on its surface seems rather low-quality, but not blatantly off-topic.

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  • FYI, IP addresses can be spoofed! And IP databases are not 100% accurate.
    – this.josh
    Apr 3, 2018 at 5:25
  • I'm not sure how that's relevant. And you can spoof GeoIP or rDNS sure, but if your IP is registered to an address space owned by the DoD, you can't spoof that fact.
    – forest
    Apr 3, 2018 at 5:28

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As I have researched and answered the mentioned question, I believe this is a legit question that affected some AT&T customers, probably at the same time.

This is not the first time this kind of question posted on Stack Exchange. In fact, I've answered another SMS problem with AT&T on Android.SE.

Regarding the sudden influx of NAA answers, it's understandable they arrived here because that's the only result when googling 6.216.198.5:8006. Most of the answers also shown the screenshots with that keyword.

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  • What confuses me more is the answers themselves. I mean, surely they aren't all natural victims of this AT&T bug who happen to have the same problem at the same time, on SE.
    – forest
    Mar 30, 2018 at 5:56
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    If a bug is happening on a customer-facing service, it is entirely reasonable to expect an influx of confused users. As SE subdomains climb the Google ranks, such events will be more common.
    – DoubleD
    Mar 30, 2018 at 16:31

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