There are simple reasons why academic institutions keep falling victims to pharmacy spam. Three major reasons are Not interested Unvisited Unmonitored For example, what is wrong with the screenshot at the top right? Well, this exploitation is about 10 days old. We did inform West Virginia University right after we first reported the incident here. But our notification has apparently been ignored.

Who cares about somebody else’s problem? At least, WOAY-TV doesn’t. A few days after we contacted West Virginia University, we found out that the spam webpages were not removed. So we decided to use the power of local awarness. And we even informed their local TV station in West Virginia, WOAY-TV. It’s just our guess that they weren’t interested in someone else’s problem.

The main reason why academic institutions keep falling victims is that the uses of student and faculty webpages are often unmonitored. No school employee regularly patrols student-owned or faculty-owned webpages. We patrol our websites more than 20 times a day with a lot smaller number of workers than any academic institutions have.

It is also true that college professors don’t bother to visit their own school webpages. Nowadays, each college professor owns their own webpage but only to post office hours and course numbers. So once a new semester starts, he or she doesn’t have many reasons to go back to their own webpage and make changes.