Spam Attack!

byenebeliuk

371 followers

8 years ago

Something interesting happened to my site this morning. I received 6 sign ups. I was happy that maybe the bit of work I'd done on pinterest was starting to payoff. I checked my pinterest account and there were no new followers. Then it dawned on me that I didn't have a registration form on my site for people to sign up to. I had taken it down the day before because I was having problems with the set up. So where did they come from?

The emails I received notifying me of the new sign ups all appeared to come from Wordpress, but each and every sign up came from the same email address. (....@mailcatch.com). That was my second warning sign.

I googled 'mailcatch', and it turns out that it's a temporary or fake address that spammers use. All websites can be targets, but especially blogging sites. The fact that it's able to bypass Wordpress is disturbing in itself.

Some of you may already have heard of this, but it was news to me. I've taken measures to get an email block plugin for temporary addresses, and if you haven't I think you should too. I downloaded it in Wordpress and it's called Block Disposable Email.

Has anybody else had a similar experience? Are there any other safeguards that can be taken?

Rose