An unwilling accomplice
I just found out that the spammer who's been bringing down my site (along with others hosted on the same server) to its knees in the last couple of days did it through an old formmail script that I had installed in the MadrigalDinner site a while back. The script has a security hole that spammers can exploit.
I feel really bad, since I've been pretty pissed at my provider for the server outages and it turns out I was partly responsible. Damn those spammers. If you haven't done so, go and contribute to SpamCop.net and narc on all the spams you get (I already do).
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for the record, if you want to use spam cop great -- but use a new (and temporary) forwarding address to do it. i ended up receiving MORE spam after i started reporting things that i was before. it's a great concept, but some people are waaay more excited that you even opened the message to forward it along than they are worried about getting in trouble, apparently.
Stepan, how does this affect the integrity of our websites? Is the spammer able to infiltrate and destroy/manipulate content?
PS this may be a neophyte's question. What was that thing about no stupid questions? Or is that a stupid question.
The spammer does not affect the integrity of your website, as far as the content is concerned. It does affect your website in that response is slower (it takes a while for pages to appear) or the server is completely down (the web server had to be restarted or the machine had to be rebooted). So your content is safe, but the website may not have been accessible 100% of the time.