One of my recent posts attracted a comment that I can only interpret as attempt at stealth spam. The text of the comment was sufficiently vague that it could be considered on topic (if not well reasoned or insightful). What indicated the comment was spam instead of badly argued partisan hackery was the comment subject and URL. A cursory glance through the comments may not have identified this. I can only assume this is an attempt to game search engines (although I doubt Google and friends consider my blog to be particularly influential).

The element I find interesting is the content used. The post in question was fairly harsh in a specific criticism of Microsoft. The content of the comment was a vague and unconvincing defence of Microsoft, but not a defence of any specific charge. This raises the question of how a spammer would identify the post as relevant. I can’t see it being done manually, regardless of how low someone is paid the economics simply couldn’t add up. This implies spammers are now automatically evaluating blog content to determine what content they can post that will best disguise their payload. Criticism of Microsoft is obviously a sufficient common occurrence that they can have suitably reusable content pre-written, as would doubtless be the case for many other scenarios.

I may despise them but if this speculation is correct it seems spammers have escalated the arms race again (or I’m horribly out of date in this area). I suspect I won’t be able to turn off comment moderation any time soon. Bastards.