5 Ways To Get Your Website Shut Down By Spammers | Agent Software Blog

Every day spammers hit thousands of sites and a great number these are shut down by their ISP or webhost for 'mistreatment'.

Damage done by spammers can take two kinds:

like posting adverts in your newsgroup or junk comments in your website which are irritating and time consuming to conclude but are unlikely to get you shut down.

Here, then, are what I view as the top 5 issues spammers could cause to your own company, and how to proceed about them.

Many contact forms like the popular formmail script can be attacked by hackers, empowering them to e-mail thousands of junk messages an hour using *your* server, *your* bandwidth and thus *your* cash. This hefty server load slows down your website and any others hosted on the exact same server and may well cause you difficulties when your webhost sees what's occurring. I 'd my FTP account to one of my websites blocked several years ago for just this kind of difficulty.

My host refused to unlock it unless I consented to forever remove my contact form so spammers could not use it any more.

Just as poor, a incorrect junk criticism out of your domain, could also lead to you being blacklisted (at best) or shut down (at the worst).

2) Significant Server Loads

Any automated scripts used by spammers can cause actual drains on your own server as it slows to some crawl. This is the reason websites such as Google will prohibit you from using their services if you are found using any automated scripts to get their website.

That is commonly seen in the type of newsgroup hacking - spammers either posting countless adverts for your newsgroup, or picking everybody's email addresses in order to spam them separately by e-mail.

I've had it occur to me and seen the pages got fire through the roof for several weeks.

The easy answer here is to (1) keep a close eye on your own newsgroup, prohibiting spammers by IP and email, and if needed briefly disabling your newsgroup until they get bored and find another casualty and (2) register for upgrades whenever an upgrade of your preferred forum software can be obtained so that one may update when possible to keep security differences to your bare minimum.

If you received 5,000 spam e-mails in the next hour you can be confident your host would take note.

*Do Not* actively give it outside on your website as spambots can readily pick this info. Give it as an image file if you must, or use a safe contact form or help desk script to actually enhance security.