Web Forms Attacked by Spider Spam

As a Lotus Domino Email Administrator I deal with a lot of spam issues, which can wear on a person's nerves to the point of wanting to quit a high paying job for some mundane job away from anything that even resembles a computer. Spam comes in many forms getting through some of the best spam blockers on the market today. One that can really be frustrating to combat if you don't have the correct anti-spam filters in place, is Spider Spam that populates online or web forms.

There is good Spider Spam and there is bad Spider Spam. Good Spider Spam assist search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, in helping you find the web page you are looking for. Bad Spider Spam, on the other hand, is very vicious, causing unsolicited junk emails to fill up your inbox very quickly. A couple reasons people spam web forms is to boost their search engine ratings and to deliver advertisements.

Spider Spam can work in two different ways, manual and automated. The automated tool searches the web looking for web pages that suggest they are a comment or guest book form. They also search pages for the @ symbol, because they know that this means an email address is posted on the page and they can send this to a database for future spamming. These collected email addresses can also be sold or traded among different spammers. When they find a web form, guest book, blog or anything that has fields for input, the Spider will populate these data entry fields with URLs that contain spam similar to a regular spam email. Manual Spider Spam works the same way except it involves hiring cheap labor, usually from overseas, to do the same thing by hand.