Spam through Marketo Form on External Website

[Anonymous]

We have several Marketo forms on external pages of our corporate website. Occassionally we have spam bot form submissions, but it is rare. We posted a new form last week and it has been fine/spam free, up until yesterday when several spam submissions started coming through and creating new leads - the spam varies from submissions that have lots of repeated words and foreign language symbols, to submissions that are English but clearly spam. In terms of the form fields and Java script, everything is identical to our other published forms that aren receiving spam. 

Any ideas on why this would happen - and how we can stop it? We have removed the "comments" field and this seems to have stopped the spamming for now, but I wonder if there are other things we can do so that having "comments" does not make the form vulnerable.  

[Anonymous]

Hi Lauren,

Erik Rehn offered a great solution to this on another post.  Essentially, you can create a simple custom CAPTCHA to stop any bots that aren't specifically targeting your page.  Being in the education industry, you could probably do something clever with the CAPTCHA to reinforce your messaging, such as using a simple math question.

More information:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PMC5AAO

[Anonymous]

CAPTCHA is my first answer, but we ran into problems with this due to hard-coding and not enough people who can hard-code.  We we made up our own!

I created a CAPTCHA field whose label is something like "6+2=".  If the answer is anything but 8, we don't receive a notification or sync it to SFDC.  You can set up a batch campaign to automatically delete those submissions if you'd like or just comb through them manually if you're unsure.

Hope this helps!