Thanks Dwayne. I agree - it annoys me to no end that there are people who's sole purpose in life is to destruct and destroy. This morning I had to patch our mail server because a little known exploit was being used to fire off DoS attacks. I spend most of my day trying to combat spam on our mail server, now it's coming through our web forms. With so many studies done on how much time and money is spent on dealing with this stuff, you'd think Congress could do something more about it. Oh well, wishful thinking. (and I don't mean for this to turn into a political discussion!)
Nonetheless, I will probably try the CAPTCHA method. I don't know that people would actively go out of their way to send us snail mail to ask about joining our organization, so we need some sort of contact via the web. Todd -----Original Message----- From: Conyers, Dwayne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 27, 2006 12:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [wdvltalk] Hijacked forms Todd Richards [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ink wired: > Some of my sites lately have been experiencing a case of spammers > hijacking my forms to send ads and other crap. Yesterday we started > getting the same thing at work here from our recruiting website. > The forms are mainly "for more information fill out the form below" > so we need to be sensitive of not putting them through a ringer to > send the form. Obviously my bosses aren't too happy that they have to > put up with the crap, and I'm not very happy either! I have a few > other sites that seem to have been spared so far, so I'd like to be > prepared as it's just a matter of time. I had this happen and I figured for my purposes it was easier to do without any on-line contact: form, email or etc. The spam to actual customer ration was 9:1. Fortunately, all form data was written to a text file, so the attempts to invoke JavaScript or to redirect to some other web page were extinguished. Currently, I ask any serious inquiries to be sent via snail mail. We are receiving legitimate mail only, since spammers won't spend 39¢ to spam you. But this may be impractical for most businesses, so I would use the captcha to foil the bots. However, note that there are people who will manually type spam into a form with captcha (something we also experienced). I think President Bush needs to round up people with nothing better to do than to find web pages and type spam into their contact forms -- and have them do something useful, like serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Hmm... perhaps we need a way to track down spammers and automatically draft them into the service? But back to the original post, the captcha is a great line of defense... But not 100% impenetrable. -- I made magic once. Now, the sofa is gone. http://dwacon.blogspot.com ____ The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or use the web interface http://e-newsletters.internet.com/discussionlists.html/ Send Your Posts To: [email protected] To change subscription settings, add a password or view the web interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/read/?forum=wdvltalk ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: unknown lmsubst tag argument: '' To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with. ____ The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] or use the web interface http://e-newsletters.internet.com/discussionlists.html/ Send Your Posts To: [email protected] To change subscription settings, add a password or view the web interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/read/?forum=wdvltalk ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: unknown lmsubst tag argument: '' To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
