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Ok, maybe hate is too strong of word, despise is more like it. I despise hackers about as much as I despise spammers. Lately, almost every day, I’m either fighting off a hacker who wants to play havoc with one of my domains or a spammer that wants to fill my inbox with bogus requests from one of my online forms.
Normal spammers don’t bother me much, as my spam filter catches those and they go bye bye real fast. The spammers that use bots to automatically fill out online forms are really starting to get my fluff up.
Thanks to Patti Serrano and her ever watching eyes, she caught a hacker on one of my sites, shortly after the attempt was made. She alerted me via Twitter Direct Message (another reason I love Twitter) about this and I immediately stopped what I was doing and thwarted their attempts.
In this particular case, the hackers were not malicious, just having a little fun exploiting a security flaw in my online shopping cart. It took me about 10 minutes to identify the flaw and seal the hole and get my site back online again.
Now, the spammers had to be dealt with. Since the site they were hitting is not programmed in PHP, I couldn’t use something elaborate as Captcha, so instead, I sit down and wrote my own routines within the form submission program I am using (sort of like Captcha, but not as sophisticated) and then I tested this new setup and it appears that this will stop the spammers (for now at least).
Like anything else that is working right, hackers and spammers are a way of life for an online presence. These ever present thorns in our back sides won’t go away very soon. Take my advice, especially if you have multiple web sites and domains, check them frequently for hacking attempts and get your sites fixed right away or else it could cost you customers, visitors and most importantly, your reputation.
Oh, one more thing to remember, if you have ANYTHING that requires a login and password, DON’T just set this to the default or turn it off so that it is easier for you to get in. If it’s easy for you to get in, it’s easy for EVERYONE to get in!
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