Spammers have been doing it in emails for a while: Adding random words or portions of text that are unrelated to their actual "message" in order to get their spam past the spam filters. Similarly, spamvertized sites often contain text fragments taken from other sites in the hopes that the search engines would think it's proper content (so-called scraper sites).
And now, it seems, this trend is starting in trackback spam as well. Here are a few examples I've seen over the last 2 weeks:
On geeklog.info (the German support site for Geeklog), we got a few trackbacks for buy tamiflu online
with the trackback's blog_name field set to supposed person's names (Brodtrager Karin, Wood Roy Stephen - note that in both cases they seem to have the first and surname in the wrong order). The actual content of those spam posts were headlines scraped from articles on geeklog.info, e.g. Geeklog und PHP 5
and Das Forum ist da ...
Our Bulgarian friends are taking it one step further now:
online prescription for hydrocodone
scrolled!Nicosia Ronnie knobs gaited probabilistically Deutsch wellbutrin xl http://www.realestatenow.net/wellbutrin-xl.html
However, it didn't help any of those spams. To be effective, they still have to add their keywords (and all those drug names make nice filter criterions) and links back to their sites.
Still, it shows that after a certain lull in recent months (not that the amount of spam has gone down - but it was filtered pretty effectively) the spammers are beginning to try out new things. Which means that we should be on the lookout.
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