New Spam Threat Hits 90,000 Sites - Is Yours Next?

Copyright 2006 Richard Adams

On Tuesday I received 423 emails from an unknown spammer attacking my site.

On Wednesday I received 789 emails from the same spammer.

Action had to be taken.

The emails were copies of posts to my discussion forum - the typical spammers posts - keyword stuffing, numerous hyperlinks to junk sites crammed with even more keywords.

It was clear I was being hit by one spammer, with an automated script, for a number of telltale reasons:

1) Nobody could post 789 posts to a forum in 24 hours manually

2) All posts were from random .co.za email addresses (South African domains, but likely false)

3) All posts pointed to very similar spammy sites obviously made with the same auto-generation software

4) Checking various domains promoted within these posts in WHOIS showed they were all owned by a certain guy in Paris

I carefully combed my forum for these junk posts but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. So I checked for posts by .co.za email addresses, or French IPs but couldn't see a problem anywhere.

Where were they coming from, and where were the posts?

To help me in my quest I did a search on Google for the text that began every email which read:

"The following was posted in the on "

But couldn't find any links that were any help.

So next I investigated the content of the emails for common factors and found the following Javascript snippet began every message body:

"var defDoor"... before launching into other Javascript elements, followed by the keywords and links.

I wonder...

A quick search on Google and two factors astonished me...

1) Google showed up 92,600 pages with this code on, of which every one I checked matched the exact spam posts I was seeing in style and content. So we were dealing with a professional of some magnitude.

2) They were all on forums, but not the one I used, but WWWBoard as available from http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html

A quick search with my FTP software through the bowels of my admittedly large site that has been online for 5 years or so and has seen more reworkings than Pamela Anderson showed I *had* got WWWBoard installed on my site but had stopped using it years ago in place of my current forum software.

I had completely forgotten about it, and there were the hundreds of spam posts sitting there on my server!

Obviously I don't use the script so instantly deleted it and the spamming stopped dead overnight but if I'm one of over 90,000 victims this guy has duped then a little advice is necessary:

1) Appreciate that there are security flaws to WWWBoard and you either need to watch your forum very carefully or consider switching to another script.

2) Don't leave old scripts sitting around on your server waiting for spammers to abuse them. Use them, or delete them.

3) Try to avoid using obvious folders for scripts. Whilst I didn't link to my old forum from anywhere on the site, it was in an obvious folder so a spammer (or a script) could easily have guessed it.

4) Realise that security threats are very real if you get reasonable traffic and take steps *in advance* to minimize the risk to your own site.

About the Author:
Richard Adams is the founder of www.merchantaccountforum.com , one of the net's most popular merchant account advice sites.
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Why Is Spam Such A Problem?

Spam can be a lot more damaging than you might think. Obviously, they are the most annoying thing that you can receive through your inbox, but it goes deeper than that. If you are like the millions of other internet email users, you know that sending and receiving email is a free service that comes with your internet service.

Internet service providers are great for providing you with a way to send letters to your friends and family while saving you the cost of postage and envelopes. You can even send cards for free with an email address. But don't let the free service make you think that you don't actually have to pay for it. Let me explain.

Internet service providers and web hosts do not get their email services for free. They have to pay for something that we do not have to pay for as consumers. They have to pay for bandwidth. That might not mean much to you, but for these companies, it means that they are forced to produce mass emails, and this means that their costs increase as well.

It may not seem to be a matter for the mere consumer, but let me tell you that this does affect you; here is how:

Since they are forced to send mass emails, which in turn raise their costs for service, you as the receiver are forced to pay more money for you internet service. This in a way helps ISP's to reduce their overhead costs.

Some of the cheaper ISPs like Net Zero help to cut their costs down by charging outside companies money to spam and add those annoying pop-ups to your homepages. Since the advertisers are paying for their pop-ups, you get a break on the cost of using them as an ISP.

Other popular companies use affiliations to assist them with keeping their costs down, eventually leaving the consumer with a pretty good rate. I'd prefer to use an ISP that simply goes for the search engine affiliation as they have much better pop-up prevention on their side, and they actually provide you with a service.

About the Author:
Chris Hickman owns a site with the best advice about how to stop spam free. Check Out his site at http://www.how-to-stop-spam-free.com
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

5 Zero Cost Solutions to Spam

Spam is a daily nuisance for all of us. It doesn't matter whether you're employed or unemployed. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO of a multinational or if you're a work at home parent - spam affects us all.

There are dozens of porgams available for fighting spam. The major problem is that most of these programs cost money.
What I'm going to do is show you 5 different ways of combating spam - all free.

1. Don't give out your personal email address.
This is stating the obvious but it's the first big mistake people make. DO NOT use your personal email address for sign up forms, competitions, surveys or any other nonsense that may result in you being spammed. It's much easier to prevent spam, by never giving out your personal email address, than it is to cure the problem once you're on 100's of junk email lists.

2. Use a free email account
Set yourself up with a Hotmail, Yahoo or any other free email account and use it as a spam holder account i.e. use it on all those popups or sign up forms that you *suspect* may try to spam you. You can then periodically check your free email account for both legitimate and spam email and delete the rubbish you don't want. This single step can save you countless spam related headaches.

3. Use a disposable email address
You could also try a disposable e-mail address from www.spamgourmet.com. This is a brilliant idea. Once you've registered your forwarding email address (your personal email address) with them you can then create self-destructing email addresses that stop working after receiving a specific number of emails.

4. Use a free spam filter.
Unfortunately even when you follow all the correct steps you can still wind up getting junk email. There's only solution at that point - install a spam filter on your PC.
The best free spam filter I've come across so far is Mailwasher. An excellent program that won't cost you a penny.

5. Newsgroups and forums
Spammers love newsgroups and forums. They especially love the way people post their personal email addresses there. It doesn't matter if it's a paid, private or free forum spammers have their harvester programs hunting for email addresses every minute of every day. If you have to post your email address then use the following format:
username AT domain.com. If that doesn't make sense then what I mean is instead of posting as test@spam-site.com you'd post as test AT spam-site.com.

Spammers can harvest 35,000 email addresses per hour from newsgroups and forums - don't let your email address become one of those.

There you have 5 simple, free solutions to drastically reduce the amount of spam you receive every single day. If you want to learn more about fighting spam then drop by spam-site.com.

About the author:
Niall Roche
Need a spam blocker? Check out Spam-Site.com for spam filter reviews and spam related information.
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