Mysterious Rash of Comments

[kerravonsen]

Has anyone else been getting these weird spammy comments on old posts on LJ? I've gotten three so far; the characteristic is that the comment is simply the repetition of one sentence from the actual post. Two of the comments I observed were exactly the same sentence on exactly the same post. I suspect it's a bot or a virus or something like that, because the accounts that did it looked like legitimate accounts, rather than accounts that had just been created for the purpose of spamming.

No, I can't point to the actual comments in question, because I deleted them. Weird comments are often used by spammers to test whether a site is being neglected, and therefore vulnerable to being used as a spam platform.

Comments

[tptigger]

I haven't. Do you have "log IP address of anon comments" turned on?

[kerravonsen]

They weren't anonymous comments.

[tptigger]

So they went to all the trouble to make accounts just to spam. Very odd.

[watervole]

Not me. I had a recent comment on an old post, but it was a genuine (and quite interesting) one.

[kerravonsen]

8-)

[kalypso]

Yes, I've had exactly the type of comment you described - a repeated sentence from one of last month's posts. The poster's name was in Cyrillic.

[watervole]

Ah. I got one today on LJ. (albeit on a new post) and the account was clearly a spam one with interests like 'sexy young ladies'.

It repeated one of my sentences, but it would have been a logical comment if it had come from a friend.

[izhilzha.livejournal.com]

I've gotten spates of other types of spam in the past, but haven't yet seen this one.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I got one that just said "vilakins".

Seriously, what's the point?

[kerravonsen]

I figure it's a test-run for a new spam-bot; checking whether the code works, checking whether the owner of the account is aware enough to delete spam.

It's an arms-race: spam versus anti-spam.