i think the primary thing spambots are used for these days is the spread of malware to aid in the formation of a botnet. people pay big money to access these botnets (which are comprised of exploited personal computers) for unscrupulous deeds
the giant blobs of text are madlibs to try and fool anti-spam services that have algorithms to detect spam. one of the big ones is akismet
its actually very easy to do, theres lots of software specifically designed to automate the spamming process like xrumer
http://www.botmasterlabs.net/xrumer/
you can see how it works right here:
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/blogs...xrumer.swf
i've been very successful in preventing spam on my website because i'm using layered services to achieve defense in depth. this has enabled me to not require a captcha on my forum/imageboard. theres a lot of things out there like the aforementioned akismet
the giant blobs of text are madlibs to try and fool anti-spam services that have algorithms to detect spam. one of the big ones is akismet
its actually very easy to do, theres lots of software specifically designed to automate the spamming process like xrumer
http://www.botmasterlabs.net/xrumer/
you can see how it works right here:
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/blogs...xrumer.swf
i've been very successful in preventing spam on my website because i'm using layered services to achieve defense in depth. this has enabled me to not require a captcha on my forum/imageboard. theres a lot of things out there like the aforementioned akismet