Anyone who knows what I’m about will have guessed that I’d take an interest in the spamming attempts on this blog site. And indeed I have. However, a couple of weeks ago I had a slew of comments for which I can’t deduce a motive.
They took the form of meaningful comments to half a dozen posts – the sort of thing you’d normally let through even they they didn’t add any useful knowledge. They were also well written, by someone who clearly spoke English. But they didn’t add up.
The author purported to be an American cleric, and the comments were written from that viewpoint. However, they didn’t smell quite right – there were a few slips that suggested they weren’t written by a west-coast American priest. Investigation revealed they were, in fact, sent from a computer in Manchester or thereabouts.
So what’s the game? Well there were no links or other nasties in any of the posts. The web site of the poster (which may well have been blocked anyway) was a religious blog in the USA, but it hadn’t seen any activity since mid-2006.
Could this person have been creating an identify for a sock-puppet? Well having waited a couple of weeks, the name hasn’t appeared anywhere else. It could be that the poster failed to convince anyone, but the Internet is a big place and most blogs aren’t posted by computer security experts.
The only explanation I can think of is someone trying to create an identity with enough rights that subsequent posts could get through unmoderated. This would have taken a great deal of further work, especially as the email address provided was an anonymised temporary one.
So, I’m still stumped!
Some of the comments were quite funny, so I might let them through anyway and see what happens.