No, it is more or less people from Turkey and Vietnam trying to copy stuff directly off the page, much like Googlebot does. However, they are displaying it as if it is their own creation, in violation of copyright laws and indices. They are pulling the full text off pages and generating their own with third party software, which violates 17 USC § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems, DMCA, and the original Copyright Act of 1976. There is another perpetrator in Vietnam, but I am working both sides of the coin. I have spent all day working on this issue. The linkbacks are not malfunctioning. They are simply being abused. The goal of the plagiarizer is always to benefit in some way. On the Internet, this is usually monetarily. They harvest as much data as possible, irregardless of context, the author's intent, the financial situation of the host, and so forth, and pretend as if they are providing the solution. In reality, it is duplicate content and a waste of resources on the search engines. The linkback notifications were simply a symptom and not a cause. But they work to enhance the position of a potential intellectual property thief in this regard. Now they have a link coming from us going to them - which is why many sites have abandoned the entire idea (abuse).
I digress that we have taken the extremely unusual step of disavowing the sourced backlinks these sites are providing to Google. This is considered an extreme step, but with these sites simply capturing the full text of entire websites, it is better to disavow any links that lead back to us from them. We are working at the three most obvious levels to resolve the problems permanently. There is no internal security risk whatsoever as the database remains as fortified and secure as ever.