June 1, 2006; 02:44 AM “Webmasters complain that they’re drowning in an ocean of spam, but
don’t realize that their websites are fertile ground for email
harvesting,” says security software expert Vadim Katcherovski.
“One spammer with just one computer can generate as many as 650,000
messages each hour and all he needs to do to capture website addresses
is send out a spam bot.”
Katcherovski is the CEO of Logic Software Inc, a rapidly growing custom
development and software outsourcing company with headquarters in
Toronto, Canada. He is among a growing number of technology
professionals focused on combating what he calls “the scourge of spam”
and the visionary leader of the team that created Link Disguisers.
Link Disguisers is a technology solution designed to help webmasters
protect their sites and their contact information from roving email
harvesters. Link Disguiser provides webmasters with a bullet-proof
anti-spam protection and a powerful toolkit for quick and easy email
address concealment.
How It Works
“A robot, also known as an email harvester, searches the web looking
for valid email addresses,” explains Katcherovski. Some address
harvesters are completely benign, seeking information to compile
website address directories.
Less benign are the robots that are used by spammers to build their
mailing lists. “Spammers have developed robot programs that can spider
through web pages, looking for email addresses,” explains Katcherovski.
The robots latch onto email addresses contained in mailto: HTML tags.
“It’s easy for the bots to spot the address “and capture it,” adds
Katcherovski.
Staggering Under the Cost of Spam and Spam Clean Up
It’s not unusual for webmasters, sales people, the technical support
staff, and the marketing department to receive hundreds spam mails in a
single day. “More than 2 million unwanted commercial email messages are
sent every 24 hours and that onslaught is costing U.S. corporations
upwards of $8.9 billion dollars a year,” says Katcherovski, referring
to a study by Ferris Research.
According to predictions from the Radicati Group, by 2007, if no
significant changes are made in email laws, 70% of all messages will be
spam. “Legislators seem unable or unwilling to stem the tide of spam,”
notes Katcherovski. “That means businesses need to tend to their own
problems.”
Developer Heal Thyself
“We know from experience what it takes to clean up suspicious and
unwanted email every day,” says Katcherovski. “When Logic Software Inc.
went online, it didn’t take long for a tsunami of spam emails to start
flooding us.” The company knew it had to address the problem and
created Link Disguiser as a solution.
To block sneaky spam bots, the Link Disguiser program allows webmasters
to convert text-written email address into an image, “disguise” email
address in a href tag, encode the "mailto:" tag with JavaScript, and
automatically integrate anti-spam protection into selected pages
(single or multiple) in Batch Mode. “Link Disguiser allows you to
generate code with anti-spam protection and then customize it for your
own needs,” explains Katcherovski.
Cutting Off The Supply of Addresses
“Spammers have a tremendous financial incentive to stay one step ahead
of anti-spam technology, so they do,” says Katcherovski. “And that
means even the best solutions allow some spam in or they block a valid
email.” He notes that Link Disguiser foils spam at the source. The
program prevents an email address from getting into the hands of
spammers in the first place.
According to the U.N.’s International Telecommunications the actual
costs of cleaning spam -- rebooting computers and peripherals,
productivity loss etcetera – may be costing companies up to four times
that amount. According to Nucleus Research, companies currently lose an
average of 1.4% of each employee's productivity each year because of
spam. “That means that for every 72 employees a company has, the annual
work output of at least one employee is lost entirely to spam,” says
Katcherovski.
Simply put, “Spam is bad for the bottom line,” says Katcherovski.
“Companies that don’t have good anti-spam protection will end up
spending a lot of time, money, and man-hours to purge their in-boxes
manually.” He believes the smart solution is to “invest a small amount
of money on a dynamic, customizable tool like Link Disguiser,” a proven
solution software priced at less than $30.
“It’s affordable and it works more effectively than simple anti-spam
software,” says Kathcerovski. “Link Disguiser stops the flood of
unsolicited messages before it begins by keeping your email address
hidden from spammers.”
For more information or to order Link Disguiser, visit www.linkdisguiser.com.
About Logic Software Inc.
Logic Software, Inc. is an innovative custom software development
company based in Toronto. Logic Software has delivered hundreds of cost
effective and high-quality software solutions for a wide range of
industries and domains, including Link Disguiser, a professional
anti-spam solution that foils the attempts of spam bots to harvest
email addresses from web site.
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