Complementary Comments

strangely similar comments received via form

[DelliTranswait]

My daytime job involves editing content for the website of a government agency. We currently have a comments form webpage to get feedback from our visitors. The form generates an e-mail message that goes to a few people in my office, but comments are not posted on the website in anyway. The only information the form collects is the visitor's name, e-mail address (so we can respond), the comment itself, and what webpage the visitor was viewing before coming to the comment form.

Recently we have gotten a slew of comments that are very similar in many ways: the comments are very generic ("nice website, guys"), the e-mail addresses are all from the same free web-based e-mail service, and the visitors' names are all one-word Greek names.

(Usually comments are very specific to the website and kind of technical in nature.)

It's kind of weird to get these comments that are all the same. Could this be any kind of scam? Anything to worry about?

[edited by: DelliTranswait at 1:24 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2007]

[jatar_k]

sounds like standard comment spam. Alot of comment spam is just a compliment and a signature to the site they are promoting.

I don't really think it is anything to worry about.

As with any form you need to be sure it isn't exploitable, meaning they can't inject headers to send email to other people.

[DelliTranswait]

The weird thing is, there are no links to anything. The form does not have a place for a URL, and the comments don't have any URLs in them.

[pageoneresults]

They may be using your scripts for header injection spam.

[jatar_k]

the page may be called comments.html or something and I was looking at some guestbook/blog spam today which looked exactly like what you are talking about.

just a bot that thinks you're something else.

Though as p1 mentioned, harden your mailer script, just in case.