I have been working on a method to sell my work online. I thought I would add an e-commerce plugin to this site to automate some of the process. Yesterday I noticed I seemed to have a lot of anonymous users signing up, and with random 6 or 7 letter names. After some research, it seems the wp-commerce plugin has a bug that allows spammers to make accounts. Luckily I have other settings in place, so I don’t think I sent out any spam or other weirdness. I have removed the offending plugin and purged the extra 6000+ accounts. Aaargh…
I guess the price of writing a spam bot is easy enough, and there are enough uneducated people who respond to spam, as well as enough naive web administrators that it is worth it to create these malware things. It probably took me longer to find the problem and fix it than it took the …I don’t want to say creators, or programmers… These terms are complementary… idiots to write the web crawler.
I wonder what the success rate is for these spam bots. One in a million? in a billion?
Oh the joys of technology…