Spam through our website...
Author
Discussion

Raffles

Original Poster:

1,931 posts

260 months

Tuesday 13th September 2005
quotequote all
My parents have a couple of websites for their businesses; www.dunvalanree.com and www.carradalecottage.co.uk

Both sites have enquiry forms for visitors to fill out for more information, and this is e-mailed to my parent's account.

But there is loads of spam coming through this, which seems pointless, and just takes up a lot of time.

Emails arrive, and they are the enquiry form, but for each question, the answer is just an e-mail address such as dhg@nvalanree.com

How can we stop this annoyance? We get loads!

Cheers, Robbie

timsta

2,779 posts

276 months

Tuesday 13th September 2005
quotequote all
The simplest way I can think of is to check for the offender's IP address in the logs, then block them.

agent006

12,058 posts

294 months

Tuesday 13th September 2005
quotequote all
Raffles said:
Emails arrive, and they are the enquiry form, but for each question, the answer is just an e-mail address such as dhg@nvalanree.com


Are you sure the email form isn't just shagged and putting the wrong data into the wrong fields?

Munter

31,331 posts

271 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
We've started having the same problem with our website. Not managed to get hold of the web designer yet....gerr.

Log suggestion would be all well and good but our isp denies that they keep logs of activity to webspace.

Munter

31,331 posts

271 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
hummmm..... and now it's taken the website down....gerrr

_dobbo_

14,619 posts

278 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
I've started to see this through my personal site. I think some spam robot thing is just trying to exploit web forms - it's a pretty common thing to be honest.

Only thing I can think is to code something into it to prevent the process being automated.

Maybe take the form input, write it back to the page and then ask

"do you want to send this email".
[yes] [no]

This should stop the vast majority of automated attempts to abuse it.

Munter

31,331 posts

271 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
Yeah i'll have to set the designer on it. In the meantime I just replaced the page with one without a form.

RameshUK

595 posts

292 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
1.) You could use a script which shows a random image with characters. In order to send the email , users have to type the characters displayed.
A verification code which many *large* websites use.

2.) I Had a quick look at your websites.

The mailto: links for your contact emails is a big no no. You need to convert them from plain text (ascii)to encoded emails.

Basically spammers crawl websites looking for simple email addresses to add to their databases.
If you encode it (using free tools available on the web) their spiders/crawlers have to work harder ...they normally give up and look for an easier target.

Do a google search for "email address encoder" and type your address in. Then cut and paste this into your html page.

R

JamieBeeston

9,294 posts

295 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
_dobbo_ said:
I've started to see this through my personal site. I think some spam robot thing is just trying to exploit web forms - it's a pretty common thing to be honest.


Yes, thats most likely it.

Formmail used to be the single biggest method of getting spam out, insecure scripts that allow the parsing and processing of CC: blah@blah.com in their text boxes etc.

We get it every so often on client installed scripts on the Register1 VDS's, we simply check the weblogs and Deny the IP range of the originator (typically Korea / China / Russia)

Simply code some security checks into your scripts (like disable all magic characters, only allow the mail to be sent to the hard-coded address, a local address is even safer etc)

You need to get this resolved tho, else you will find yourself (domain) on a blacklist, which will actually stop your clients being able to mail you, or get mail from you.

J

_dobbo_

14,619 posts

278 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
JamieBeeston said:

_dobbo_ said:
I've started to see this through my personal site. I think some spam robot thing is just trying to exploit web forms - it's a pretty common thing to be honest.



Yes, thats most likely it.

Formmail used to be the single biggest method of getting spam out, insecure scripts that allow the parsing and processing of CC: blah@blah.com in their text boxes etc.

We get it every so often on client installed scripts on the Register1 VDS's, we simply check the weblogs and Deny the IP range of the originator (typically Korea / China / Russia)

Simply code some security checks into your scripts (like disable all magic characters, only allow the mail to be sent to the hard-coded address, a local address is even safer etc)

You need to get this resolved tho, else you will find yourself (domain) on a blacklist, which will actually stop your clients being able to mail you, or get mail from you.

J


My sites written in a proprietary coding language, and the form is hard coded to send to me.

What I'm seeing is MIME encoded data being pasted into the message field in an attempt to fool the form. It's not working, as the mail comes to me, but it's annoying to keep getting these!

Might have to get and sort it

Raffles

Original Poster:

1,931 posts

260 months

Wednesday 14th September 2005
quotequote all
Cheers for all the help!

I have seen these random character tools on other sites; we should look into getting one of these put on. That should stop the bast**ds.

robbie