ita, the bot is back. There's more clean up to be done on the user list. This is getting tiresome.
And remember, if you hurt her, I will beat you to death with a shovel.
Willow ,'Conversations with Dead People'
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.
DXMachina - Jul 28, 2005 4:31:39 pm PDT #52 of 4671
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.
tommyrot - Jul 28, 2005 4:36:42 pm PDT #53 of 4671
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Can you block its IP address?
(Nah, it's pro'lly not that simple, huh?)
DXMachina - Jul 28, 2005 5:14:17 pm PDT #54 of 4671
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.
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.
DCJensen - Jul 28, 2005 5:29:23 pm PDT #55 of 4671
All is well that ends in pizza.
Could the AOL part be spoofed?
DXMachina - Jul 28, 2005 5:34:03 pm PDT #56 of 4671
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.
Possibly, but given that we only see it by accident, I doubt it. More likely they're just opening new aol accounts.
tommyrot - Jul 28, 2005 5:38:59 pm PDT #57 of 4671
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
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?
DXMachina - Jul 28, 2005 6:13:41 pm PDT #58 of 4671
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.
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.
tommyrot - Jul 28, 2005 6:22:57 pm PDT #59 of 4671
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
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?
§ ita § - Jul 28, 2005 8:23:09 pm PDT #60 of 4671
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
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.
Eddie - Jul 28, 2005 11:44:02 pm PDT #61 of 4671
Your tag here.
Huh... that's kinda neat in an EVIL way.
Well, one easy fix would be to add a checkbox to both of those pages that says:
[] I am not a Buffybot.
If the box is not checked, then they're a bot. Poor man's CAPTCHA.
I've never used it, but this looks promising and fairly trivial to implement. Note that the author (rightly so) points out that CAPTCHAs are not friendly for the visually impaired, so that may be a consideration.
Edit: I just tried it out and it's very trivial to use. Pretty cool, too. However, IE doesn't render the image properly, 'cause IE isn't standards compliant. Too bad. There are other alternatives if you wish to explore this further.