Weird Form Entries

[Mighty]

HI Folks,

I have a feedback form on my website and it was submitted today with the content below:

We have received the following feedback through our website general feedback form.

We have received the following feedback through our website general feedback form.
Name: h9993@mysite.com
Email: h9993@mysite.com
Company/Organisation: in Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=61c17a4260ebc004119bbfe3af4f7319 MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: e was describing to bcc: bajfla2@aol.com This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --61c17a4260ebc004119bbfe3af4f7319 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit town about you. ou and your lahertys setting yourself up agen the riscolls that would never lower themselves to be --61c17a4260ebc004119bbfe3af4f7319--
Address 1: h9993@mysite.com
Address 2: h9993@mysite.com
Town/City: h9993@mysite.com
County/State: h9993@mysite.com
Postcode/Zip: h9993@mysite.com
Country: h9993@mysite.com
Phone: h9993@mysite.com
Fax: h9993@mysite.com
Reason:
Comments: h9993@mysite.com


Should I be worried about this?

Mighty

 

[ca8msm]

I would be slightly concerned that the type of information submitted was actually sent to you before being validated (i.e. the phone number clearly isn't in a correct numerical format).

I'm not sure if you have to be that worried in terms of what the user was actually trying to do, but you should look into validating entries so this type of spam isn't allowed through. It may also be worth implementing some sort of CAPTCHA entry in case this was an automated submission.


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[Mighty]

Excuse the ignorance but what is CAPTCHA

Mighty

 

[ca8msm]

It's one of those forms that asks you to input a particular sequence of randomly generated numbers/letters.

http://www.captcha.net/

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[ChrisHunt]

the phone number clearly isn't in a correct numerical format

Actually, it's not a good idea to over-validate the phone number. The user might enter any of these:

(123) 456789
123-456-7890
1234546 ext. 234
+44 243 4444464
12345678 call after 10am
... etc ...

All will make sense to a human reader, but it's hard to validate for all possibilities. Unless you have a pressing reason to annoy the user by finding fault with their (to them) valid phone numbers, don't do it.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[ca8msm]

Fair point Chris.

I maybe should have said something like "as all of the details that have been entered are identical, that clearly isn't valid" as I was just trying to point out that the submission above shouldn't have really been allowed to get through to you.


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[BabyJeffy]

The contents of comapny/organisation is the main clue here. Whoever is using your script is attempting to use it as a spam relay via mail header manipulation.

I would take a close look at the server-side code you use to send the emails... you may want to check that you are stipping out \n and \r in the message. Best to check the folks on the forum that represents the server-side environment you are using (php, asp, jsp etc).

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page @ Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/blog/

http://www.coedit.co.uk/

[/tt]

What is Javascript? FAQ216-6094

 

[Wullie]

Unless you have a pressing reason to annoy the user by finding fault with their (to them) valid phone numbers, don't do it.

If you want an example of bad validation, take a look at the following:

http://www.paessler.com/ipcheck/trial

Why would anyone force a Name field to be at least 6 characters? What do you do if your name isn't that long.

Mighty,

You need to act quickly to plug any possible holes in your script. I see these attempts daily on client's sites and normally the first few e-mails are to test the waters, then if any of their mails are relayed the script will be exploited very soon and they wil hammer it with thousands of e-mails.

Hope this helps

Wullie

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