Recently, all users of the Mount Riga website received two emails in Russian. An understandable first reaction upon receipt of an email like this is to assume that somehow the website has been hacked. Fortunately, this is not the case.
We have run several security checks in conjunction with our website hosting partner and can confirm that there has been no security breach to the Mount Riga website. The origin of this email is a bit complicated but the very short explanation is that a spam bot was able to access a message board form that is built into the platform that we use to run the functionality on the site. This form is not linked to anywhere on the site but bots generally scan a site to locate all forms and was able to find this one and submit as a comment to the message board (anyone who’d like the more technical explanation of how this happened is welcome to reach out directly to me).
In order to prevent this from happening in the future, we’ve put a CAPTCHA in place so that bots cannot submit to the form (unfortunately, we cannot remove the form itself entirely) and are working with the creator of the plugin to create a fix that will prevent any similar occurrence in the future. If you ever see an email like this come through in the future, please know that we will jump on it as quickly as possible and, of course, do not click any links included!
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