I’ve often thought of spam as one of the worst things about the Internet. There’s the fact that a lot of it is done as an attempt to scame people, of course, so I don’t like that. But there’s also the fact that there’s just so much of it. Most of it is, I assume, automated by programs that run without human intervention. So there’s just spam comments and emails being created and either blocked by spam filters or deleted or ignored probably thousands a second or some other more impressive number I can’t imagine. How much energy does that eat up? I assume it’s as bad as NFTs and crap like that. The very fact that we need to have spam filters is a bad, like the internet equivalent of sunscreen protecting us from UV rays, except spam was created by people who are fine with making the world worse. It all saddens me.
I used to have a lot of problem with spam on the site, but judging by last post in my spam tag being from 2012, I thought it was less of a direct issue for the Book of PDR. That has changed. The spammers have dragged me back into their electronic underworld of internet evil.
About a week ago, someone apparently hacked into my website provider thing and used my account to create 500 new email addresses. I assume this was all done by bots and the emails began to pump out spam emails. I knew nothing of this. I am meant to get an email when someone who isn’t me logs into the account, but it didn’t happen. Also, supposedly I was sent an email by the company’s security people saying there was suspicious activity, but I received no such thing. I have to assume the spammers have ways around such things. I learned of all this when suddenly I was not allowed to send emails (though thankfully I can still receive them) and I tried to log into the control panel and I was locked out of that as well. Only when I got through to the support people did I learn what had happened.
So anyway, they let me back into the control panel and I did indeed find that someone had indeed created 500 email addresses using my domains (they were just named by numbers, which means there was a “69@contains2.com” in there, which amused me slightly). Anyway, it took me FIVE HOURS but I did delete all those bastards.
I did eventually determine that there were some logins from Oslo that I did not get an email about. I got an email when I logged in on my phone, and when Marq logged into help me, but not these Oslo occurrences. I doubt the spammers are actually from Oslo, I assume their bots just use it as a base or whatever, but now I have to hate Oslo for at least one calendar year. Sorry, Oslo.
As of this writing I do not have the ability to send email back yet. I hope that is changed soon, but I am aware this could all be worse. I love my website and I hate to see it’s fragile stability threatened by jerks.
