Blog spam through social engineering - Approve comments conservatively.

This blog is maintained in Wordpress. It offers some protection against spam, for instance by requiring me to authorise every comment on a posting. By default, Wordpress assumes that if you approve a post from a person once, you want all comments from that post approved automatically. This saves me from having to approve each and every comment. However, I almost fell for a clever social engineering attack that tries to abuse this very feauture...

In fact I received the following comment the other day.

This is a very thought provoking post. I am glad to see this topic being covered. I like reading these types of articles they help to keep me in the loop.

Very flattering, and I almost approved it. But then it dawned on me that the comment was very generic: it could apply to any blog posting. So I suspect it was actually sent by a spam bot trying to gain access to the comments section of my blog (and many other blogs through the same kind of message). So, if you see a comment like this, do not approve it, no matter how ncie or flattering it is.