Receiving some kind of senseless spam - what is its purpose?

Question

Technically, this cannot be classified as a programming issue, since I already implemented the solution. Nevertheless, this is an interesting problem in the field of technology.

Anyway ... I created a basic contact form without any protection against spam. Upon learning that it did not work, I ignored it and set up Javascript to change all the links pointing to the contact page, use mailto: links instead. (I wanted to replace the form with an appropriate message to contact me.) Yesterday, I discovered that the form now suddenly works because I receive spam from it. Here is an example:

Message received from the contact form.

Name : pvenvoqks
Email : [e-mail]

Message : Mx7orZ iafgvohkzxmv, [url=http://wxmrsloamyhf.com/]wxmrsloamyhf[/url], [link=http://gloukuwmttnj.com/]gloukuwmttnj[/link], http://vmekxmqouktx.com/

This is obviously just gibberish. I checked the links and they do not work. It seems that the robot simply sends random data to the forms - although note that it managed to pick up that the email should be sent to the appropriate field.

My question is: is this spam trying to serve a purpose? . I would understand if the links led to real websites for drugs or malware or something else, but they do not. It just seems random.

In addition: if someone is interested, I used the "hidden field" solution to combat spam. I used a hidden field called "Website" which, if completed, does not send an email.

Answer 1

The possibility is that this mysterious spam was sent to mislead spam filters and reduce their effectiveness. Some spam filters are designed to change their strategy and settings in response to the data they receive - what spam gets into the filter, and what the user marks as spam. It was just meant to confuse things and add garbage data points - essentially spam filter spam!

Answer 2

This is what I found on another site that makes sense:

"I could be wrong, but I think it's Blackhat SEO spammers who search for blog comment forms or Wikis. Using randomly generated unique" words ", they can then do a Google search to find sites where their content was sent unmoderated.

They can then return to these websites, determine if the links were placed without the rel = "nofollow" attribute (which would prevent them from contributing to the Google algorithm), and if they cannot post any spam links that they like websites to improve Google’s ranking for specific sites. Or, even worse, use it to publish any content they want on these websites (embedded malware?)

Therefore, I think this has less to do with mail server exploits and other website exploits.

Source http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=25205

Answer 3

The purpose of the email may have been to determine if your address bounces, if not, then the address may be resold.

It may also be that the URLs were valid at some point in the past, but were withdrawn.