Done and done.
Buffistas Building a Better Board ++
Do you have problems, concerns, or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.
ita, the bot is back. There's more clean up to be done on the user list. This is getting tiresome.
Can you block its IP address?
(Nah, it's pro'lly not that simple, huh?)
What's happening is someone with an aol address (I think) is trying to register groups of five random letter user names using e-mail addresses of randomletters@buffistas.org. Since the e-mail addresses don't exist, the registration fails when the system tries to send the confirmation message. Also, their script isn't very good, because one of the attempted user names always looks like this:
xhsskxuw@buffistas.orgnContent-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============0031847247=="nMIME-Version: 1.0nSubject: 2a1cdc5enTo: xhsskxuw@buffistas.orgnbcc: jrubin3546@aol.comnFrom: xhsskxuw@buffistas.orgnnThis is a multi-part message in MIME format.nn--===============0031847247==nContent-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"nMIME-Version: 1.0nContent-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitnnlbzhztn--===============0031847247==--n
The bcc is why I think it's coming from an aol account, but the IP has changed with each batch.
Could the AOL part be spoofed?
Possibly, but given that we only see it by accident, I doubt it. More likely they're just opening new aol accounts.
I'm confused. Wouldn't a human have to actually look at this site in order to figure out how to get a bot to sign up? Or are there bots clever enough to find sites on their own and try to figure out likely ways to sigh up & log in?
Beats me. We don't tell people about the confirmation e-mail until after they submit the registration.
I'm still trying to figure out what they hope to accomplish.
google jrubin3546@aol.com
see anything interesting?
eta:
especially [link]
I'm seeing an interesting new attack on my website where the attacker is hoping to exploit unchecked fields in a "web to email" form. The attack works by assuming a field used in an email header (such as the "From:" address or the "Subject:") is passed unchecked to the mail subsystem. Appending a newline character and a few more carefully crafted header lines with a BCC list and a spam message body might trick the underlying mail system into relaying spam for the attacker.
eta²: do I get a cookie?
Hmmph. I'm way too tired to see if they could be hitting our e-mail Admins page too.
Thanks for the lead, tommy.
Tomorrow.