From a spate of blog comments spam I just received, it now appears that spammers are no longer just spamming, they are now using spam for no other reason than to abuse bloggers, perhaps even to turn them against each other. I got dozens of blog comment spams which had three URLs in them–all bloggers. I am giving them all the benefit of the doubt, as I sincerely question the idea that these three bloggers all got together and asked for spam to be sent featuring random posts from their blogs. One of them is even a blogger I read regularly.

So that means that some scumbag spammer out there probably chose blog posts from bloggers he usually attacks, and inserted them in the spam. No link to the spammer, no profit to the spammer, no comprehensible reason why the spammer would send such spam–except for the sole reason of pissing off bloggers. One effect may be that the bloggers’ URLs may now be added to spam blacklists, meaning that legitimate comments that link to these guys’ blogs may be blocked close to everywhere in the blogosphere from now on–the blogosphere’s equivalent of a bad credit rating. Hopefully the people who manage these blacklists will realize what’s going on and remove the URLs from the lists.

It may even have been a test of a new spam system, just to see if it works. In the past, there have been spam attacks with no rhyme or reason, using an inoffensive link or even having no links at all. I noted that in this attack, each spam had a different fake IP address, and rotated name and email addresses, making it harder to delete from the database; this is not exactly new, but it may be a test of a technique to make it harder to filter and delete the spam. Not that a single one ever got through Movable Type’s comment moderation on my blog, and previous versions of MT-Blacklist would have made it easy to zap the common URLs. This is also the second morning in a row I’ve awakened to a massive spam attack, both of different yet persistent types, so it could be the same sleazeball trying out different methods. If so, the idiot didn’t get himself anything. But then, it seems that such was not the point of the exercise.