Reference Access Eliminated
The dangers of guest books and comment pages
Hotline.ie received a report during 2009 about a legitimate business based in Leinster that apparently had many links to what can only be described as explicit references suggesting child sexual abuse material was stored at the link destinations.
On investigation it was found that what the reporter was referring to was a series of links that had been placed on the comment area of the website. This area was intended for satisfied customers to leave their views about the specific products offered by the business. Unfortunately, this did not have any control against automated spamming of the comment field.
The site had fallen victim to just such an attack and indeed the link descriptions were assessed by the Hotline analysts as highly suggestive of child abuse material in that they employed some well known terms associated with such material. In fact on following the links the Analyst found they were advertisements for "life style" medicines.
Even though this material is not illegal the Hotline believed the business would not want to be associated with the kind of terminology in the Comment space. The site was traced and found to be hosted outside of the country. It also appeared that the owners of the site had gone out of business.
Guest book dangers contd.
The Hotline sent e-mail advising what to do to the owners and cotacted the ISP - however little happened for many weeks. The site is now down.
"This is yet another example that website owners must monitor what is on their site. If they have dynamic content this should be moderated." siad Paul Durrant. He went on to suggest "that sites should employ captcha technology to prevent automated spamming to comment areas and guest books".
