Reply
Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
Old 03-25-2006, 03:07 AM Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
Super Talker

Posts: 102
I'd appreciate any advice on realistic risks I ought to take precautions against on low traffic websites such as email address harvesting and bandwith theft, and what I should do to prevent problems.

Thanks.
doggy is offline
Reply With Quote
View Public Profile
 
When You Register, These Ads Go Away!
Old 03-26-2006, 05:54 AM Re: Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
Average Talker

Posts: 18
Best advice I can offer on protecting against email harvesting is to not place email addresses directly on the pages. If you need to allow visitors to send email from the site, use web forms.

From what I understand, email harvesting is done by reading the content on a page rather than the underlying code. If you have a form that uses a perl or php script to send mail, then the email addy is embeded in the code of a non linked page/script and not visable on the site.

As for bandwidth theft/excess traffic, the most common instances are someone linking to a resource (image, script, video/audio clip, etc.) or just someone pointing traffic to your site. Most of this is done by people just linking to your resource in their code (i.e., <img src="http://yoursites.com/images/imagename.jpg">). I don't know of any real preemptive defense against this. Really all you can do is keep an eye on your bandwidth and make sure you have a decent stats system that can tell you where most of the traffic to your site is comming from. If you notice in your stats that 80% of your incomming traffic is comming from a specific site and is pointing to a specific file, then you should probably contact the owner/maintainer of the site and ask them to kindly stop leeching your bandwidth. If you're willing to provide them with the resource (and if it's yours to provide) then you can offer to give it to them so they can link it locally on their site.

Hope this helps

Last edited by shardinite : 03-26-2006 at 05:55 AM.
shardinite is offline
Reply With Quote
View Public Profile
 
Old 03-28-2006, 03:46 PM Re: Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
trendybox's Avatar
Experienced Talker

Posts: 43
you can also create images of your email address and put that up there.

www.whois.sc uses a good method of securing email address via an image that is trickier for bots to figure out.

the problems with doing that are:
a - there are bots that interpret the images anyway
b - you should put an alt tag on the image which would end up giving them the email address anyway.
c - it would cut back on accessability by people using text browsers or visually impaired users.
d - there are a bunch of people with nothing better to do then to go around and manually harvest the email address so an image wouldn't stop them.

A note of caution about using web forms: make sure you use proper SERVER-SIDE validation when you use a mail script. Attackers can insert header injections into your fields to BCC and CC the email to alternate address with alternate messages.
__________________
-[Trendy Box]-
http://trendybox.net
trendybox is offline
Reply With Quote
View Public Profile Visit trendybox's homepage!
 
Old 03-28-2006, 04:40 PM Re: Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
sarahk's Avatar
Junior Talker

Posts: 3
Name: Sarah
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
I've written a tool to obfuscate email addresses in a way that bots don't seem to pickup on. Just laziness on their part but there are so many fresh emails to harvest elsewhere they don't need to work any harder. Seems to work though

The problem at whois.sc is that you can't click the images. No problem for their use but if you want people to contact you (ie and then spend money with your company) then that's not so good.

My solution is a good middle ground.

http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/obfuscate.php
__________________
Simple SEO
sarahk is offline
Reply With Quote
View Public Profile Visit sarahk's homepage!
 
Reply     « Reply to Stopping email address harvesting / security tips?
 

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are Off
Pingbacks are Off
Refbacks are Off


Webmaster Resources Marketplace:
Software Development Company | Webhosting.UK.com | Text Link Brokers 


   
RSS Feed  Feeds: RSS   JS   XML
RSS Feed  Feeds for this forum: RSS   JS   XML

 


Page generated in 0.12116 seconds with 12 queries