Spam Harvesters Are On Your Website!
“If it were possible to redirect the time and effort poured into antispam and antimalware code over the last 10 years, we’d already have colonies on Mars and probably a new form of renewable energy.” (InfoWorld).
We have to agree! Spam now accounts for between 95-98 percent of all email and is not going away anytime soon. The main issue is that current solutions focus not on eliminating spam altogether, but on preventing it from getting into our inboxes. But this causes many legitimate emails to get buried in the spam folder, and also does not solve the issue of spam floating out there on the Internet, consuming bandwidth and resources.
We have recently installed a program called Honey Pot, which works to blacklist spam harvesters. We have been able to report hundreds of suspicious IPs to be blacklisted. While doing this we were SHOCKED at the number of suspicious bots out there crawling our websites.
We have become more aware than ever of the importance of protecting ourselves against spam. Never, ever just put your email address on the Internet, unless you’re willing to deal with an overwhelming amount of spam. If you need to place your email address online, you can either use a graphic that spam bots cannot read, or break the address so that it cannot be harvested by the bots. So, instead of me@mydomain.com you should type me (at) mydomain (dot) com.
Of course, as we said above, any measures we take to protect against spam are costly and limited. For each IP we report, another one will pop out in its place. The real solution needs to come from IT companies. SOMEONE needs to find a way to kill spam before it is ever sent out. Just imagine how much faster and more efficient the Internet will be without spam!
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