Some spam bots are human

Out of curiosity I've taken a look at what kind of spam is now getting through our automated defenses. I did a little digging and confirmed a long held suspicion.

In a nutshell, I've caught a 100% human spammer and thus verified that indeed there are people in China who's job it is to post comment spam on random websites.

The attack came from 120.43.13.81, a Chinese IP.

On Jan 12th 8:53:02 he first came to our site from Google. He was searching for:

"post new comment Create new account site:.org"

Landing page:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/support/20101205/lamp-new-user-problem

Browser: IE 7

2 minutes later (08:54:39) he tries registering for an account.

1 minute later (08:55:38) - he verifies the email by clicking on a link in his hotmail webmail.

He spends the next 5 minutes trying to post a spam comment unsuccessfully to:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/easy-vps-tuning

The content:

""" Welcome! Genuine UGG Elsey Boots

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All 5 of his post attempts are rejected by Mollom on the basis of the content.

09:00 - human spammer leaves the web site with nothing to show for his efforts.

Why I'm sure this is a real live human being:

1. This is a real browser that downloads images, CSS, and scripts.
2. He got past spamicide, Hashcash, bad behavior and even Mollom on user registration. The only thing that stopped him was content analysis of the comment post attempt.
3. The timing: a computer program shouldn't have taken 7 minutes to do the job. Sure you can program in delays but what would be the point?
4. He didn't give up after the first failure: it would be stupid to automate such a pointless heuristic. A stupid programmer wouldn't be clever enough to write a program that either controls a real browser for this purpose (very resource inefficient) or emulates a browser so perfectly that you can't tell the difference.

I almost feel sorry for the poor wretch. Worst job ever.