Website Abuse Update

After a spammer used this website to contact some number of users, I have spent some time trying to figure out the best countermeasures. Since the dimwit utilized the Alumni Directory Contact Form I immediately removed that feature. So if you have received one of these obvious scam emails from Wayne Alumni E-mail after Oct 16th around noon, please let me know (check the actual received date, not when opened).

After the initial panic of thinking I left some type of security hole in the website, a couple of days of looking things over has me somewhat relieved. All of the current protections worked as intended. The most feared abuse is a spambot that can automatically gain access to a form and send out large numbers of emails. This didn’t happen. I also don’t believe email addresses were compromised. It seems that this particular moron just did it manually, or maybe with some automation, but it certainly was not very effective, at least if quantity is important. I didn’t think anyone would be that desperate to go after this relatively small number of people the hard way. But its hard to figure out how an imbecile thinks.

But they did, and I have made some further changes to alleviate the problem. The Alumni Directory E-Mail is back on, but you will have to wait if you want to contact more than one person at-a-time. If you have any problems with it, or get any more of these bogus emails, please let me know.

Spammer

For years spammers have been trying to gain access to this website. There have been thousands of failed attempts of spambots trying to either register at the site or spam any of the forms on the site. Up until now, the built-in protections have worked.

We had our first instance of a spammer actually going to the trouble of writing a program or manually contacting a large number of alumni, which seems like a lot of work for 1850 possible customers. For now, I have disabled the contact form until I find a better solution.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the spam emails they received.

I will be closely monitoring the website for more trouble. I will also likely take a look at adding more safeguards to the email form. Thanks for your patience.