With each contact form, the risk of spam increases. All these unwanted messages are not only annoying but also increase insecurity. In this article, we’ll show you the dangers of contact form spam and how to best protect yourself against it.
How does a contact form pose a spam risk?
Spam messages are bulk messages sent via e-mail or other electronic messaging systems such as
contact forms are sent. They very often include phishing or malware that can cause serious damage to the site. However, these are usually not manually sent messages.
Fraudsters often develop programs that scan many websites for insecure contact forms. Once enough contact forms are found, they are filled with scripts, i.e. a list of computer commands. With incorrect or invalid contact information, mail is sent and recipients receive spam.
Which forms are endangered?
Basically, any form you use on your website is at risk. In addition to contact forms, this also applies to order forms or forms for entries in the guest book. The key point is: There is a risk of spam if forms are insecure.
The more forms the scripts can fill out, the higher the chance that the submission will be successful. Automation gives scammers the opportunity to submit thousands of contact forms in one go.
What protects against spam messages?
An easy way is to put a barrier before submitting using captchas. An example is Google’s reCaptcha. Here, senders have to enter or check various things, such as a sequence of letters and numbers or ticking a box. In this way, the user confirms that he is not a robot.
These captchas are a hindrance, but more and more fraudsters are looking for ways and solutions to bypass the most common captchas. Website operators can thus distribute the content of the form to multiple pages. This makes it difficult for automated scripts to finally send spam messages.
Mittwald: A hoster that supports anti-spam
If an insecure contact form is infested with spam messages, it’s often too late. It makes much more sense to act preventively. That’s exactly what it does Hosted by the Mittwald agency with their customers. Experts check all customer domains and target insecure contact forms. Once found, a corresponding email is immediately sent to the recipients of the contact form.
Although all domains are checked one by one, all customers have the option to contact Mittwald for free and have the built-in contact forms checked as a priority. This will give you an overview of which pages of your website are at risk and where you should make improvements.
Regular security checks should be a top priority, especially for agencies that manage a large number of websites for their clients. As this is often not possible and takes a lot of time, host Mittwald checks all websites regularly and free of charge. Mittwald also supports you in improving your forms with detailed FAQs or phone support with experts.
See for yourself now Mittwald and make sure your customers’ websites are permanently protected from the risk of contact form spam.
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