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I realize this is a pretty vague question, but I occasionally get spam messages through my contact form on a Drupal 6 site. The contact form does not have any anti-spam protection (i.e. math question). The messages I get are all very similar and just jumbled junk, like below, so I think they're all from the same source.

Example:

ylsaf0V bpsdfuxnhjjd, [url=http://wwgfsggzgyjyjm.com/]wwgrfgzrgsjyjm[/url], [link=http://xmgvyghcuufvb.com/]xmjyhvyjyfjirovb[/link], http://frgxmdghrgruhfc.com/

Anyway, I'm just wondering what the point of such a message is. All the links are dead, it's illegible, and it's not trying to sell me a product or get me to do anything, so I'm a bit perplexed. Is there any way to tell where they're coming from? And how concerned should I be? To be clear, I'm not asking how to avoid them, I realize just adding a simple math challenge or captcha would likely do the job.

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3
  • I have blocked this type of spam by disallowing hostnames with 8 consecutive consonants in links. I couldn't find any examples of this in legitimate sites.
    – finnw
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 16:12
  • @finnw Can you provide some details on how you did this? Thanks.
    – SSilk
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 12:49
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    using the SpamBlacklist extension for MediaWiki. There is probably something similar available for Drupal.
    – finnw
    Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 17:26

1 Answer 1

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11

It's probably just a bot testing out your website to see if it can be spammed. The text is probably unique so it can Google for it and if it finds it then the spammer knows your site can abused and will proceed to spam it with "real" spam. The whole process is probably automated.

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  • So if it's the way you describe, am I correct in thinking this would only work if the contact message they sent me were posted automatically somewhere on my site and got indexed later by a search engine?
    – SSilk
    Commented Sep 20, 2011 at 0:34
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    Yes. Then they would see that your site can be spammed in an automated fashion and the floodgates would open.
    – John Conde ♦
    Commented Sep 20, 2011 at 2:52
  • beware, google will now find the URLs, because you just posted them on webmasters.stackexchange.com. I don't know how the spam bot works, but consider that it could ignore where the URLs are found but if it sees them it could spam the site it originally posted them to.
    – finnw
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 16:10

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