Post #1668593

2026-04-24 21:23 UTC

Hi techie friends, I have a contact button on my website and suddenly (like the past few months) I have been getting tons of spam. Most of the spammers know my name but not much else. I thought having a contact button instead of an email address would solve that. Have bots or whatever just gotten better? (They all want to help me get rich 😂 Former public (appellate) defender here. Some want to improve my brand, which is even funnier)

Replies (9)

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social 2026-04-24 21:28

I'm hoping there is something I can do. Soon they will be able to prove they are human. What is annoying is that it comes into my email from "Contact Teri" so I can't mark them as spam.

Open ##2643308
@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange 2026-04-24 21:25

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social they are definitely specifically targetting web forms much more aggressively. a consulting group i work with that has only a contact form has gotten more "we can give you a loan" emails in the last 2 weeks than spam in the last 2 year. i'm betting someone just posted a "how to scrape and exploit webforms" script...

Open ##2643309
@alpha1beta@libretweet.com 2026-04-24 21:26

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social Is it form spam, or email spam? And yes its gotten worse, AI is made is real easy to spam people with their name, location, job title, interests and more.

Open ##2643310
@lluad@mastodon.ie 2026-04-24 21:26

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social spammers filling forms has happened forever, but it seems to have gotten to be a bit more of a thing recently, and some of the older mitigations aren’t as effective. I’m seeing them use real-ish browsers (running JavaScript) and maybe cheap LLMs to customize the messaging.

Open ##2643313
@Thad@brontosin.space 2026-04-24 21:37

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social It doesn't look like you're using a Captcha; they're not perfect but they do a decent job of keeping bots from submitting contact forms. Looks like you're using Wordpress. I use Friendly Captcha. You can sign up for a free account at https://friendlycaptcha.com/ and you should be able to find the plugin like this: Go to your Wordpress dashboard Go to Plugins → Add New Plugin Search for Friendly Captcha for Wordpress (I'm not affiliated with the site or plugin, I just use it)

Open ##2643319
@SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange 2026-04-24 23:24

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social I would consider whom you emailed to, before this started. The email addy may have been revealed.

Open ##2643320
@fandermir@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 00:04

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social What you can do is implementing a CAPTCHA. I administer a website for my sportsclub and I made the same choice of using a form to avoid spam, and still got tons of it. After adding a CAPTCHA (I used google's captcha service with the reCAPTCHA v3 that works in the background, so no "I am not a robot"-puzzle solving), the spam stopped nearly completely. Some spam gets through by guessing the email address based on website name.

Open ##2643321
@sashin@veganism.social 2026-04-25 01:05

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social I have seen some people write their email by hand, take a photo and put it on their website. That way it can't be scraped.

Open ##2643322
@progressivecat@universeodon.com 2026-04-25 04:12

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social If you do use a captcha, please use one that is accessible. I am blind and use a screen reader. Some captchas keep me from doing what I need to do. I've been on web sites that ask a simple math problem and that works good. If not something like that, atleast one with an audio alternative to the pictures.

Open ##2643325