Skip to main content

What is up with gibberish spam?

Every now and then you'll run across this - spammers dumping large amounts of apparentl gibberish in to comments, forums, etc. It's very strange - it's not code, and there's no links or anything else of apparent use to the spammer. So why do they bother?

I have a couple theories. One possibility is that it is a malfunctioning bot. That's kind of fun to imagine, but seems unlikely. Thinking about how a spam bot would be coded, I'd think it more likely to leave empty comments if something was wrong then long strings of gibberish.

The other possibility is that the bot is actually leaving a "fingerprint" in the form of a unique text string. The spammer can then check his work later by just doing a google search for this text. If the spam comes up it tells him several useful things:
  1. His bot worked and left a message
  2. The message was not deleted/moderated
  3. The page that was spammed is indexed by google
It'd be possible to have a second automated bot do this google search, get a list of the sites that worked, then go back through to leave more useful spam on those sites...

That's the best I can come up with, still seems a little far-fetched. After all, if you're going to be leaving a comment, why not include a more realistic seeming comment like "Great post" along with some gibberish, or a unique username or something?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another VI tip - using macros, an example

God I love VI. Well, actually, vim but whatever. Here's another reason why. Suppose you need to perform some repetitive task over and over, such as updating the copyright date in the footer of a static website. (Yes, yes I know you could do a javascript thing or whatever, just bear with me.) Of course you could just search and replace in some text editor, changing "2007" to "2008" (if you're stupid) - and you'll end up with a bunch of incorrect dates being changed, most likely. What you need to do is only change that date at the bottom. And suppose that because of the formatting, you can't use the "Copy" part of the string in a search replace - perhaps some of the pages use "©", some spell out "Copyright" etc. This is where vi macros come in handy. A macro in vi is exactly what you expect, it records your actions and allows you to play them back. To start recording, press q followed by a character to use to "stor...
6 comments
Read more

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...
1 comment
Read more

Great google article

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...
1 comment
Read more