There are multiple approaches employed by websites to stop spam users. For instance, when registering, users are often asked to enter captcha codes from images with letters and numbers that are intentionally distorted in size, position, color, orientation in order to make it difficult for machines to automatically decode them (they still do so). This is a relatively straightforward solution but sometimes, these codes need to be introduced multiple times (some letters can be confused with other letters and numbers).
Other ways to test whether the user is a human is to ask them general questions or to make them guess puzzles (typically, selecting images of objects of a given type from a collection of other objects). Obviously, all the enumerated tests are a waste of time for the user. Another important issue with captcha codes and puzzles is the fact that there are already “captcha guessing factories” that employ people online to guess these codes or solve puzzles in real time – this is then used by spam bots to gain access to websites.
Protection Tools To Guard Against Spam And Online Threats
Fortunately, there are other solutions that can help in the fight against spammers. Thus, some reliable anti-spam products for strong protection implement a spam firewall that uses a large collection of spam-associated IPs. Such a collection can reach millions of IP addresses reported by a multitude of websites on the net. Obviously, the IP used for spamming are changing constantly and only a fraction of these are used at any given time, hence the need to keep this list constantly updated.
The ideal spam protection service would normally unify a significant number of websites it protects under its umbrella and use this large community to its advantage. The greater the community, the greater the number of IPs reported – once reported by someone in the community, this information is ultimately available to everyone, contributing to a spam filtering product that is highly adaptable. Obviously, the entire IP checking process can be automated and used by websites in real-time to block malicious IP from the very first moments.
Such products from leading companies efficiently guard against granting the user access to spam bots after registration and consequently, against spam in the commenting section of the website. Moreover, given that much of the infrastructure used for spamming is reused for many other types of malicious activity, such services can protect against other threats as well:
- hacking;
- phishing;
- fraud;
- brute force attacks.
Given that verifying an IP address in a list (even a large one) is very fast and can be easily automated using the APIs provided by such companies, users would not notice any lags. All these, make spam filtering based on IP checking one of the most elegant and fast solutions on the market as well as a comprehensive means to cover various aspects of website security.
