Is Your Website Protected Against Spammers?

09/07/09 © Copyright Tsunami PC Productions

With e-mail spam increasing daily, it has become increasingly more difficult to fight e-mail spam. Many people now have anti-spam filters on their computer to help combat against and filter spam on their computers, but is your website protected? We have compiled some tips, tricks, and services available to help our customers combat both e-mail spam and protect your website against spammers as well.

FIGHTING WEBSITE SPAM:
Did you know that in addition to spammers sending you spam via e-mail, spammers also will now send you spam via your website forms? In addition did you know that if your website forms are not properly protected, that spammers can actually use your own website forms to send others spam, which could inadvertibly get your website blacklisted by email servers, thus preventing your customers from receiving ligitimate emails from your website?

As the technology to fight spam via desktop software increases, the spammers have been forced to get smarter about how they spam people. Gathering e-mail addresses online to spam to (see second part of this article for more details on fighting this) is still alive and well, but many website owners do not realize in the past year spammers are starting to use your website against you to spam both you, and other people. Tsunami PC Productions has received valuable feedback on a variety of website spamming over the past year and can offer you several cost effective options to help protect your site against spammers.

SOLUTION 1: New Upgraded Captcha System:
For those of you who are not familiar with CAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA is a program that protects website forms against spambots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. If you have ever filled out a form which asked you to enter the letters & numbers you see onscreen into a field, then you have seen captcha at work. CAPTCHA helps protect website security in several different ways.

Protect your Inquiry forms from spamming website owners and spamming other people via automated spam scripts.
Protect Website Registrations from fake accounts created by spambots.
Protect your blogs from spam.
Protect your password systems from hackings.

These are just a few of the ways CAPTCHA can help protect your website. The normal captcha systems worked beautifully for years, until just recently. A few months ago it was discovered that once again, spammers became smarter again and created an automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) script which like scanner software, can actually read traditional CAPTCHA systems.

Tsunami PC Productions has researched this issue extensively for our clients and come up with an improved catpcha package, which is guaranteed 100% to fight all automated spambot OCR technology, using a new system called RECAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is the newest release of CAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a system developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition software is unable to read. Click [HERE] to read more on this incredible technology.

The new reCaptcha system is absolutely incredible! This new version makes it impossible for automated spambot OCR technology to read the random words generated by ensuring that it not only uses two words (proven to be faster for people to type) randomly selected from a database of thousands, but also by digitixing these words into characters which are impossible for OCR technology to read.

With reCaptcha installed onto your website forms, your website will offer visitors both the ability to type two words OR click a button to listen to the audio version of several words embedded within a prerecorded message.

If your website has not yet taken advantage of this great technology, protect your site today with one of the options below.

NEW INSTALLATIONS:
We are offering this new package at a special discounted rate of $80 per form. If you are interested in protecting your website forms against spambots and hijacking of your inquiry forms, click [HERE] to order today.

UPGRADED INSTALLATIONS:
Existing customers who have our older CAPTCHA system installed, are being offered a 25% discount per form. Click [HERE] to order today. Unsure if you already have an older version of CAPTCHA installed? Go to your inquiry forms or member register pages and if you see something which resembles this, then you have a previous installation and qualify for discount!

SOLUTION 2: CAPTCHA + Upgraded W.A.S.P. (Website Anti-Spam Package):
Our website anti-spam package is the ultimate solution for website owners who want to protect their website from spammers. This package includes:

Installation of New Upgraded Captcha Package for 2 forms (each additional $60)
Replacement of all hard coded email addresses with graphical ones to avoid spambot gathering.
Hardening of your inquiry form submission script to eliminate both automated and manual receipt of spam. In short if your inquiry form data contains any URLs or common spam terms, it is not sent but the spammer still gets a success message.
Hardening of your submission forms to disallow submission from remote sites.

Click [HERE] for more details, or ORDER TODAY.

FIGHT E-MAIL SPAM:
Here is some useful tips and tricks to lessen the amount of spam you get via e-mail daily.

1. Never post your email address on any website:
Spammers use special scripts called SPAMBOTS which go through websites and gather email addresses listed into a mailing list. Each time you post your email address direct on your website, or post it in message boards / forums or sites like facebook.com or twitter.com in your posts, you are exposing yourself and asking to be spammed. Many website owners also make the mistake of posting their email address to their website contact page, thinking it will make it easier for others to contact them. While this is true, it also guarantees your email address will be gathered by spambots.

SOLUTION: Whenever possible, try to avoid posting your email address to websites (yours or other people), whether it is to your own website or someone elses.If this is for your own website, consider using an inquiry form for others to contact you, vs. posting your email address online. Inquiry forms can be valuable tools for ensuring your email address is not added to a spam list, and allows you to prequalify your customers information being submitted.

Unsure if your email address is openly posted online? Go to www.google.com and type in your email address. If it comes up even once, then a search engine has spidered it and thus spambots have as well too.

2. Filling out forms:
Each time you fill out a form online with your email address, you risk that email address being sold to spammers mailing lists.

SOLUTION: Either consider using a separate email address for filling out forms / purchasing online, or be sure to fully read the terms of service found on any website you are going to fill out a form on, to ensure that they stress they do NOT sell your email address to any third party companies. During any purchase online or filling out any form, when it says "You agree to allow our third party associate companies to contact you regarding..." be sure you do NOT select that option, as you are asking to be spammed.

In either of the situations above, the best solution to consider if you have been a victom of excessive spamming is setting up a new email address for yourself and send out an email to everyone whom you want to have your email address notifying them of this change. This may seem like an inconvenience, but ask yourself how much is your time worth and how much time you spend daily going through spam / bulk folder to sift through spam emails.

4. Do Not Use Common E-Mail Addresses:
In addition to spammers gathering your email addresses from websites, another common spammer technique is to send out emails to common email addresses just to see if they get rejected or not. Sending to common email addresses like info@, webmaster@, sales@, billing@ are the main ones.

SOLUTION: The best solution is to delete those common ones and create more uncommon email addresses like: customerservice@, custserv@, or any name_department@ will suffice. Also for your own business email account, since last names are not as common as first names, consider using FIRSTINITIAL_LASTNAME@ or similar. Always try to avoid using FIRSTNAME@ type email addresses.

3. Website subscription e-mails:
Have you ever received an email newsletter from a company you don't do business with, claiming that you did subscribe to them and leave you wondering when? This is another very common spammer practice where you almost immediately click their provided link to unsubscribe, and yet within a week you suddenly get slammed with 4 times the amount of spam.

SOLUTION: What happens in these cases is that even though they list what they call an UNSUBSCRIBE link within that email, when you follow that link and fill out the form to UNSUBSCRIBE, it is usually a spammers way to confirming you are a real email address. Thus you may or may not be unsubscribed from that mail list, but your email account will immediately be sold off to tons of other spammers mail lists. The best solution is if you get an email from some company you dont recognize or have never done business with, resist the temptation to UNSUBSCRIBE, add it to your computers ANTI-SPAM program filter, and delete it.

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~ author: Bruce Hakala