Contact Form Spam - but I have CAPTCHA running??

[Mark Atkinson]

Hi all,

Over the past couple days I have started receiving massive amounts of email form spam from our website - seemingly in conjunction with me setting up a Wordpress blog on my site. (You get a Joomla component to integrate Wordpress blogging functionality)

The spam always takes the same format:

Name: (Single name)
Email: (Randomly generated)
Subject: (random letters)
Message: (Some form of one-line compliment, almost always containing spelling mistakes)

What I don't understand is how this is happening despite me having CAPTCHA anti-spam on the contact form. I have tried sending email myself without entering the anti-spam but it doesn't seem to work.

I tried making the CAPTCHA longer (4 to 6 digits) in the hopes that it might work, but one minute later I had another spam email in my inbox.

Any ideas?? It's driving me scatty!

[Dave A]

CAPTCHA has been cracked by bot spamming programs for ages already...

Take a look at the anti-spam plug-ins at stopforumspam. This one is for Wordpress.

[Mark Atkinson]

Thanks Dave.

What is the point of that spam though? There is no link to a site etc?

Also it seems like those plugins you pointed me to are to stop unauthorised registrations or comments. Our problem is that our email contact form is being spammed. I'm also not sure if it would be a Joomla or Wordpress problem.

[adrianh]

I think that the spammer got hold of your email address via other means and simply sends directly to the address. It could be that your email address was lifted off a clients PC that received a response from you.

[Dave A]

Try changing the URL location of the form and see if it stops for a while...

What is the point of that spam though? There is no link to a site etc?

Spam vs anti-spam is a war, and the strategies behind what some of these spammers get up to can be less than obvious. At it's crudest, they're trying to bury the anti-spam measures in a flood, among other things.

Sometimes it's just because they can...

[Mark Atkinson]

I think that the spammer got hold of your email address via other means and simply sends directly to the address. It could be that your email address was lifted off a clients PC that received a response from you.

It's definitely not that. The email comes straight from our contact form on the website (our own email address) and is in the usual format of the email address. When I referred to the format of the emails above, that is the actual structure of the content part of the email.

Try changing the URL location of the form and see if it stops for a while...

It's not really possible as the email form is attached to every page as a module in Joomla. To change the URL of the form would mean changing the entire link structure of our website.

I just find this strange as we have never experienced spam of this nature on any of our websites. I can understand comment and forum registration spam, but not contact form spam.

I will try installing anti-spam plugins for both the Joomla backend and the Wordpress plugin now to see if that helps.