There seems to be a surge of “Russian” spamming these days. I’m getting daily “comments” from spammers linking to “somesite.ru” and customers with HTML forms, especially the “contact us” variety, are getting inundated.
The customers complain that they’re getting a lot of spam via their web site and unfortunately, the only way to try and counteract this is to try and put more intelligence in the CGI code that processes the contact form data and pipes it into a mail to the website owner. Unfortunately, we have to make a trade-off here because no business website wants to deter potential customers by making them go through a load of “prove you’re a human” filters and tests.
Not only are the spam-sending robots become much more sophisticated at managing anti-spam measures in web forms, we’re also starting to see the phenomenon of actual human spam sweat-shops! Organized spammers are realizing that, in some cases, it’s actually more profitable to pay a few cents to some impoverished workers in a developing country to manually spam sites (at least for a while, to figure out reliable ways to defeat the countermeasures).
Currently, most of the HTML form spam has had links and some “pseudo-English” comments but the rest of the fields have been filled with garbage, so tighter form field verification has temporarily slowed that down. However, it won’t be long before the robots are modified to complete fields with apparently rational values and this measure will be swiftly defeated.
The biggest problem with spam is the very reason it exists in the first place – because it works! Believe it or not, a tiny percentage of spam recipients actually respond. True, the response rate is miniscule – a tiny fraction of 1% (something in the region of 1 response per 1.25 million spams). In a normal cold marketing campaign, like a mail shot, this would be ridiculously uneconomical because the cost of conducting the campaign massively outweighs the return.
However, spammers don’t pay to send spam – they rely on “botnets” of compromised, infected computers to do it for them. This means that the average hapless Joe who doesn’t realize his PC is riddled with virii could well be cheerfully pumping spam down his ADSL line without even realizing it.
How to defeat spam once and for all!
It’s really simple in principle, just damned hard to do in practice:
- Keep your PC infection free! Run anti-virus software, scan for spyware, etc.. If you really can’t cough up for a commercial solution, there are free alternatives like AVG Free.
- DON’T respond to spam! Frankly, the people that pay the spammers are almost as irritating as the spammers themselves. I realize that not every internet user is a technophile but pretty much every internet user soon experiences spam first hand. Getting fooled into feeding the spam-beast as a neophyte is one thing but only the spectacularly dimwitted should be doing so on an ongoing basis.
In summary, you can only slay the spam trolls by starving it to death! Naturally, coordinating the masses to do this is a daunting, if not impossible, task. There’s probably a minority of losers who would think it terribly funny to deliberately feed the spam trolls anyway.
The best solution is, not to respond to spams in the first place!
Exactly, glad you agree!