Sadly this site has been the target of spammers again. Briefly on the 14 May 2006 they exploited a weakness in the feedback form to send some spam through my site and I am sorry for this. I do not endorse or support the sending of spam in any way or form. The resources of this site were stolen for unauthorised use.

Action taken: Access to the feedback form for anonymous users was temporarily disabled while the form was patched. The patch seems to have worked and subsequent spam attempts have failed.

The spam that made it through on 14 May related to some off-road vehicle manufacturer for which the spammer seemed to be trying to advertise the stock. Anyone tempted to respond to this ought to consider:

1. Any company that resorts to illegal use of other people's IT resources to carry out marketing is not a reputable company.

2. Stocks and shares sold in this manner are highly dubious and you do not need to be a CPA or CA to realise that it is almost certainly a bad deal and probably a scam.

3. Buying anything through spam email only encourages the criminals to continue.

DO NOT RESPOND TO SPAM.

Don't make the spammers/scammers lives worthwhile by buying or investing in anything they advertise. These guys are criminals but their crime only pays if there is a market for the crap they sell. They go to enormous effort to steal the resources that they use to spread this rubbish and they do cause damage to legitimate businesses and amateur sites alike. This is not victimless crime. They take control of your computer, steal bandwidth, overload servers, deface websites, damage reputations, invade privacy, steal information, design and spread computer viruses and trojans and cause many millions of people to waste time and money defending their personal computers, networks, personal information and privacy. They can even put people's lives at risk if critical computer networks are compromised or crashed.

PS: And does anyone remember the days when your computer wasn't crawling along weighed down by the firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware that we all have to use now?!?