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Anyone else getting website SPAM?
Just curious, is anyone else getting a sudden influx of SPAM arriving via your company websites?
Like most of you probably do, we have a Contact page on our website that is a feedback form… boxes to list name, company, address, notes abut your project or what you need, all that jazz. Most are boxes for inputting text, but there are also a couple of things where visitors can click radio buttons to select an item (such as whether they are a production company, ad agency, or other). Hitting SUBMIT emails it to me and my GM.
Lately we’ve been getting quite a few submissions via that form that are SPAM… such as this one….
They always have the same exact form input, with most of the input boxes ignored except for just a name and phone number. The submitted form also shows what radio buttons were clicked, and weirdly enough it always shows that ALL of the buttons were selected, which is technically impossible for an actual live human visitor to do.
They all seem to be from design or marketing or SEO places (senders such as de****************@***il.com, id************@***il.com, mo****************@***il.com, etc.).
The most contact I’ve done is hit REPLY to say “Stop spamming us,” I certainly haven’t called any of their phone numbers (well, I have occasionally added the snarky comment “What self-respecting marketing company uses a free Gmail address???”, but that’s all).
Just wondering if anyone else has seen a glut of this? Obviously the robots are at work.
It’s not enough to be a real problem, maybe three or four a week… certainly not enough to take actual pains/effort to stop it by requiring a CAPTCHA input (I hate seeing those on feedback forms with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns). Mostly just curious if we are alone in this sudden flood…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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7 Replies
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[Todd Terry] ” is anyone else getting a sudden influx of SPAM arriving via your company websites?”
I wouldn’t call it a sudden influx, as it have been happening for some time. However, SEO companies and people selling “followers” for your twitter/Youtube/Facebook etc account seems to be the worst.
One would have thought that it is robots doing it. My opinion is that a setup in China, India or Russia can do it much more cost effectively using human beings, rather than robots – so don’t be surprised if there are an actual person on the other side.
[Todd Terry] ” (senders such as designcreativesite@gmail.com, ideawebdesignz@gmail.com, momentum4marketing@gmail.com, etc.).”
Best way of dealing with those specific examples is to ask Google to remove them from the system – hit them at the source of their business and they will soon disappear.
All the Best
Mads@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk -
[Mads Nybo Jørgensen] “My opinion is that a setup in China, India or Russia can do it much more cost effectively using human beings, rather than robots – so don’t be surprised if there are an actual person on the other side.”
Hmmm… if humans are driving it, they are at least robot-assisted in some way, they are not actually filling out the feedback form like a regular visitor.
Our contact page has two “multiple choice” questions… one legitimate, and one silly…
These aren’t html “check boxes” where you can select as many as you want, they are “radio buttons” where you can only pick one answer, it won’t let you choose more than one item per question.
BUT… the emailed results show that for both questions all the answers were selected…
…which is technically impossible for a regular human visitor to the website to do.
Weird.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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So they are “screen-scraping” that page of yours and generating the report somehow?
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You see this a lot from PHP (ie: WordPress sites). Many times, they just grab the address and then set up a bot to submit form entries. The idea is to use the form to send spam to others. I used to get this all the time with my PHP forms. I no longer do contact forms for this reason as I generally have better luck with just an email link.
For deeper security, you can include routines in your code that verify addresses, backtrack IPs, confirm entries, bounce back errors or problems, etc, etc. Do a search for secure PHP mail form.
Save early. Save often.
Jonathan Ziegler
http://www.electrictiger.com
520-360-8293 -
We have a hosting company side spam filter with a quarantine folder. There I can blacklist email addresses etc. Every week or so I see if an actual client ended up there and I can whitelist them. Works great and they never hit my computer’s email….
We use Hostmonster and it is Spam Hammer.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com -
Yeah there are definite solutions we could employ, if I chose to bother… which I don’t. It’s not a problem, YET.
We host ourselves on our own servers in our building, which does make it a little more complex to employ some of the solutions, should we feel the need to in the future.
I just thought it was odd that it suddenly started happening, and in a way that at least seems technically impossible… at least for a human visitor (the multiple-selected radio buttons). And the site uses no PHP or WordPress, as Jonathan mentioned.
Ah well…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Todd Terry] “if I chose to bother”
I had to. After 20+ years with the same email domain our spam got to the point where, between three email addresses, we were getting a minimum of 200-300 spams a day — EVERY day. Our hosting company offered us a product called “Happy Mail” that nearly completely eliminated spam. Problem is that I still get things that at some point in the past (for dumb reason at the time) I signed up for. I routinely hit “unsubscribe” when it’s offered, but because so much internet traffic is coming from outside of countries with strict laws, often the unsubscribe link doesn’t work.
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