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On this site there are comments such as:

ÃÊÁ ¹67 Èìåíè Âîðîõîáîâà â Ìîñêâå (Ãîðîäñêîé äåïàðòàìåíò çäðàâîîõðàíåíèÿ) ïî ïðàâó íà -ñåãîäíÿøíèé äåíü ñ÷èòàåòñÿ êðóïíåéøèì âðà÷åáíûì çàâåäåíèåì ãîðîäà Ìîñêâû. Ïîìîùü â äèàãíîñòèêå, ëå÷åíèè (ïëàíîâîì ëèáî àâàðèéíîì) îêàçûâàåòñÿ àáñîëþòíî âñåì áåç èñêëþ÷åí

They are obviously spam, but what for? The other posts about gibberish comments have been either Bayesian poisoning, which this obviously isn't because there aren't actual words, or seeing how you format certain things in a post, which again this is pretty clear it is not.

So what is the point of this spam? What are the bots trying to accomplish?

Nico A
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    Given the classic punctuation, are you sure it's spam or rather bad encoding of non-Latin characters (Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc.)? The site potentially doesn't deal with those character sets properly. – schroeder Aug 06 '15 at 00:10
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    I agree with schroeder. The site itself seems old, so there is a big chance that site may not be handling non-Latin characters correctly. – lepe Aug 06 '15 at 00:40
  • It could also be an attempt at a Unicode buffer overflow. – Dylan Katz Aug 06 '15 at 18:05

1 Answers1

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These are almost certainly incorrectly encoded foreign characters. From some queries on "words" like âñåì and çàâåäåíèåì (chosen at ~random from the text), I'm guessing it's supposed to have been Cyrillic. For example, this Russian book on Amazon has a similarly garbled description.

I do not know of a way of mapping those things back to Cyrillic in order to read (or translate) it.

It may also be comment spam, in which case perhaps the spamming software is the source of the bug rather than the site (I see Blogspot, WordPress, and Amazon in the search results; you'd figure they wouldn't all share this bug!).

Adam Katz
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