Spam attack on Scottish Association of Landlords

Spam attack on Scottish Association of Landlords

18:24 PM, 25th January 2013, About 11 years ago 3

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Spam Attack on Scottish Association of LandlordsWe suspect that hackers have been busy trying to get into our systems over the last 48 hours via a spam attack of Scottish Association of Landlords membership enquiry forms hosted on our systems.

They didn’t manage to get in of course as our security is incredibly robust. However, we first noticed this when somebody sent in a very strange message including a cake recipe.

Presumably they wanted to see if it would be posted onto our website in order to then post spam links for Viagra and who knows what else. We have plenty of systems to prevent those types of attacks but it appears that the spammers systems mistook our Scottish Association of Landlords membership enquiry form for a commenting section.

We increased the security on the form but the recipes kept on coming in, not just in English though, we’ve seen plenty in other languages including Indian and Russian.

As soon as we realised we had a problem we spoke to Judith Dunn at Scottish Association of Landlords and asked her just to ignore them and bear with us whilst we fixed the issue. Judith was fine about the situation and asked me to thank the spammers on her behalf for the lovely recipes she now has for her dinner for the next month or so 🙂 LOL Hopefully not Spam though but plenty of Haggis, Neeps and Tatties as it’s Burns night tonight 🙂

“We considered sending the spammers a recipe for cooking a Haggis but they would have to learn how to catch the wee little critters first” said Scottish born Property118 partner Neil Patterson.

The SAL Membership enquiry form has now been replaced with the one below, hopefully this will resolve the problem and help the association to engage with lots more potential members.

SAL Membership Enquiry

  • Please enter a number from 0 to 99999.

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Comments

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

0:39 AM, 27th January 2013, About 11 years ago

Ah, I think our spammers have got upset! Three attempted attacks in 5 minutes since posting this article.

5:00 AM, 27th January 2013, About 11 years ago

The Scottish Association of Landlords (SAL) is proud to continue to act as the Secretariat of the Cross Party Group on Housing in the Scottish Parliament in 2013. John Blackwood, SAL Chief Executive, commented: “SAL is pleased to welcome Margaret McDougall as the new Chair of the cross party group on housing in the Scottish Parliament and looks forward to working with her as SAL continues to ensure that the concerns of private landlords in Scotland are heard by our MSPs.”

SAL, in partnership with the Residential Landlords Association (RLA), have developed the most comprehensive joint policy group representing over 20,000 private landlords and agents in the UK. Together, both organisations ensure that landlords views are heard at the seats of power in Edinburgh, London and Cardiff.

22:02 PM, 27th January 2013, About 11 years ago

Mark, I have this every day.

There are automated bots out there that retrieve pages, look for form posts and fire crap at them. Hence Captchas. We get hit every now and again. Last one was about a week ago. First was about 5 years ago. Some make absolutely no sense - some have links to porn sites, which presumably are drive by attacks for malware or other viruses.

Just something we have to live with and guard against!

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