HELP! I'm getting SPAM through my website form!

tina2 · Jul 25, 2005

Ok, I thought I was being totally safe.
I know that you never put and e-mail address in plain sight, so I created a web form using the cfmail tag to send e-mails through my website (Windows 2003 server IIS 6.0 Colfusion MX 6.1)

I just received 5 spammy e-mails that were sent through my form all from addresses spoofing my domain name. 4 of them had the subject line and e-mail body format that is set out in my tag, but on of them hade a random number as the subject line, and this in the body:

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--===============1157817781==
Content-Type: text/plain, charset=\"us-ascii\"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

fni
--===============1157817781==--
" <>
To: themeadowlark@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Meadowlark Comments-Suggestion
Cc: khofstra@irc-group.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: ColdFusion MX Application Server

<html>
<head>
<title>The Meadowlark Restaurant</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="

http://localhost/meadowlark/common/css/main.css">

</head>

<body marginheight="4" marginwidth="4" topmargin="4" leftmargin="4">

<table cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td class="bold" colspan="2">Here is a comment/suggestion made by a customer.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bold">Full Name: </td>
<td>gormo@meadowlarkrestaurant.com</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bold">Email Address: </td>
<td>gormo@meadowlarkrestaurant.com
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1157817781=="
MIME-Version: 1.0
Subject: 6866292e
To: gormo@meadowlarkrestaurant.com
bcc: bergkoch8@aol.com
From: gormo@meadowlarkrestaurant.com

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--===============1157817781==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

fni
--===============1157817781==--
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="bold">Comment/Suggestion: </td>
<td>gormo@meadowlarkrestaurant.com</td>
</tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>

Should I be worried? Has this ever happened to anyone?

imstillatwork · Jul 27, 2005

thats what the hard-to-read-jpg-with-words-on-it-that-you-type-in-the-form are for.

Although, there is no way to stop someone from manualy filling out a form and submiting it...

TruthInSatire · Jul 28, 2005

actually, what you're experiencing is the next gen of spam. I get it a lot with guestbooks, email forms, stuff like that. It's an automated "spider" that will submit information to your form. I'm sure they're not trying to send the message to you. the bot probably submits a "to" field with about a thousand addresses. Your form only goes to you so nothing to worry about as far as being used as spam mail for thousands of people.

some safeguards:
1) check the user agent. make sure it's a valid browser
2) check the refering page. make sure it's actually from the form page.
3) check the form variable list. if there are fields you're not submitting ignore the request.

good luck

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HELP! I'm getting SPAM through my website form!

tina2

IS-IT--Management

imstillatwork

IS-IT--Management

TruthInSatire

Programmer

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