New Blog Spammer Trick?

I’ve noticed something new with comments on this blog recently. It is a little bit sneaker than the normal approach,

See, typically most spammers want to get their links on your blog, and they’ll certainly be sure to use the commenter’s URL field as target #1:

The link there gets linked to their name. Free PR juice. As you may have noticed by the text near my comment fields, that drives me nuts

This new approach is a bit different. For starters, there’s no website URL left with the comment. Just a name, email address and comment text.

The names are all similar to each other. The email addresses are clearly all generated from the format of firstnameLastNameYYYY@mail.com. The YYYY part is a year and mail.com may also show up as gmail, email or hotmail as well. But the name portion is always exactly the same as the commenter name and is an easy pattern to spot in volume.

I’m assuming the idea is for them to just get one comment approved. Many blogs are setup such that a person’s first comment has to be manually approved, but once approved all subsequent comments are automatically passed.

So if I approve one of these innocent looking comments:

It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place

and now the person has free reign to get all their subsequent comments on the site.

Devious!

I might have to re-enable Bad Behavior and see if stops some these up front. Of late, I’ve just been relying on Akismet alone. I can’t quite recall when/why I turned of BB. Hmm…

WordPress users: One way to mitigate this, aside from the plugins mentioned above, would be to revisit the “Discussion” settings of your blog. In particular, the “Comment Moderation” setting:

Keep that value small!

Somewhat amusing side note: That example comment (above) was left on a post announcing XP SP3. Hardly a technical position paper and definitely tipped me off that I wasn’t looking at a real comment. (‘cause Lord knows, I’ve written posts where that would’ve been a completely valid comment!)

[Updated the next day] According to this blog post on the Akismet site, it sounds like what I’m seeing is called precursor spams.

[...] spammers have recently learned to post several comments over time, the first of which contains no link or obvious clue.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Another Tool in the Blog Anti-Spam Toolkit
2. Blog Spam reaching new levels
3. Comment Tracking
4. Knowing When to Close ‘em
5. Blog Comment Tracking