Maryland and Virginia Real Estate and Homes Blog

ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS MAKE A BUYER REFERRAL.

Earlier this week, I received a contact from a prospective home buyer about a property in DC.  I thought of Patricia Kennedy, one classy lady whom I knew would give these buyers the thoughtful and experienced service I seek in referral agents.  What followed led to an adventure in doing business on the Internet and concomitant technology beginning with:

• A Blackberry that was not operating.
• Phone messages not received.
• A blog loaded with extreme porn.
• More telephone messages.
• An e-mail acknowledgment.
• A phone call received.
• A referral made. 
• The porn removed from the web site.

SPAM FOR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY.  Over my years on the Internet, beginning in 1994, I have had to fight spam, hackers, spy ware, viruses, worms, more spam, and more porn and smut than any teen aged boy would want to hide under his mattress. 

It’s an ongoing battle that is annoying and costly.  In past years, when I tried to control the spam, I helped the spammers by having my e-mail address on my web sites, little realizing that was exactly where the spammers were getting my e-mail address when they crawled the Internet.  By 2004, it was taking me up to 2 hours just to download and dump the overnight spam volume.  A couple of years ago, I wised up and use a web based e-mail link that requires manual input.  Getting my e-mail address off my web pages reduced the spam volume considerably. 

Finally, in 2005, I installed spam filters on my Internet server which eliminated 95% of the daily volume.  Most of the rest I controlled with e-mail filters in my e-mail client.  As of today, the spam that comes to my e-mail box is minimal.  Who knows how much legitimate business is lost by these Draconian measures to protect myself and my business from absolutely choking on spam?  Who knows? 

DON’T LET YOUR GUARD DOWN.  This is a wonderful example of why it is imperative to monitor our Internet presence. 

I had one blog attached to Homefinders.com hacked.  Google caught it deindexed that page because the hacker had installed spyware.  Rather than try to repair it, I dumped the entire blog.  The risk of having my flagship web site hacked was too great.  There was clearly a hole in the Wordpress system big enough for a hacker to drive through.  I updated the Wordpress for all of my blogs to more secure issues.  My other outside blogs get a bit of spam and some smut but I have to approve them, which I don’t.  I add content to these little blogs regularly and the first task when I go in is to dump the comments.  Monitoring blogs is time consuming, but has to be done. 

It’s sad that, not only do we commit time and resources to Internet advertising, we are bombarded by the kooks and criminals that are way smarter than the law enforcement entities that purport to protect us.  Most of these intrusions into our blogs have little to no business intent, but are hacking for the sake of hacking or posting smut for the sake of posting smut.  They gain little if any benefit and merely operate to cause chaos.  Some very sick people get some very sick satisfaction of harming innocent and legal entities and individuals by their actions.

We are powerless to stop them.  So, we must be vigilant and do what we can to protect ourselves. 

ACTIVERAIN GOT IT RIGHT.  We complain when we get a single unsolicited e-mail from an itinerant Nigerian spammer trying to give us $23,000,000.  However, I am of the opinion that the systems in place on the ActiveRain system and servers are absolutely wonderful, professional and effective.  Protecting the ActiveRain blog from hackers and spammers was clearly paramount in the ActiveRain management planning and they did a good job.

SPAM will be with us for ever.  I personally would like to see some perp walks, but then, I always do.