I host a vBulletin forum on a US server. I've been getting a lot of signups from one particular spammer, wanting to post about gold harvesting for WoW. I've blocked his IP's, however he keeps using proxies.
He constantly signs up under the name "Array"... Is there a way I can block him for good? I can't moderate user sign-ups, as I'm mostly away from my computer and can't moderate them all the time.
They fortunately did not do anything exceptionally terrible, but the site was down, they altered the serps results and now my inbox ( operating from Squirelmail ) is now receiving even more spam than before.
A network expert suggested that my server would now be being used for sending spam.
And my company, who will remain nameless atm seem to claim that no server is safe from hackers under any circumstances.
I would like to copy to you the companies response to my questions and I would hope for a word or two of inspiration and encouragement from you?
The second string in each question is the server companies response.
1.Please quote me for checking to see if the server is being used for spam and blocking this from happening.
We could certainly check and see if you server is currently sending out any spam and try to identify where it is originating from. Depending on the issue a fix may be required by your developers
2.Running a check on the sites code to see if there has been any amendments to the coding on the site
We can check and see if there has been any FTP access and look at file modification dates, this would hopefully pick up and issues.
3.Making sure the server is safe and that all China ip ranges are banned.
Whilst we cannot ban all Chinese ranges as we do not know all ranges China uses we can lock FTP and SSH access to certain ranges only, you would need to provide these ranges.
4.Applying a second level of security to stop a spammer from hacking the system ( However I am sure I already have anti virus and spy ware on the server )
I’m not sure you do have any anti-virus/spyware on your server, it is certainly not something we install. I don’t really believe either of those tools would stop someone hacking the server either, Linux server don’t really get affected by that. We could run a rootkit checker which checks for backdoors and modification of the operating system files. We would also suggest making sure the scripts are secure and any web interface (admin area) logins have secure passwords and are also IP restricted.
For the work above we would charge 1 hour support at £150 per hour ex vat.
how to bypass Chinese internet filters? They seem to filter a lot of the western web sites in China, sites like hotmail, gmail and etc seem to be filtered more then sites such as sohu.com, 163.com and qq.com
is it possible to configure so, that it would be possible to receive only in Latin and Cyrillica written mails? No Chinese, Japanese, etc. characters, I mean.
I have recently been receiving reports from AOL's feedback loop that my server is sending out spam. I have checked the whole server, but cannot find anything strange.
There are some strange things with these feedback reports. I'll post a few lines below (i crossed out my domain with xxx):
Quote:
Received: from andersenreesel by holderem.xxx.biz with local (Exim 4.23)
Received: (qmail 64859 invoked by uid 24901)
Received: from janislanhami by xxx.biz with local (Exim 4.26)
Received: from raphaelpinkertone by standei.xxx.biz with local (Exim 4.23)
Received: from imanoldelphine by dispatched.xxx.biz with local (Exim 4.23)
Received: from conrado by hostic.xxx.biz with local (Exim 4.23)
The first issue i have is with the subdomains, like "dispatched", "standei", "hostic", etc. These subdomains do not exist on my system. Also, my server does not run the exim MTA.
Another issue i have is the "invoked by uid" statements with uid's 147 and 24901. These UID's do not exist on my system. The passwd file uid's go to around 110.
Apart from these strange things, the IP that is listed in the upper part of the headers:
Quote:
Received: from xxx.biz (xxx.biz [85.xxx.xxx.xxx])
The domain and IP address is correct there, which should indicate that the spam was sent from my system. Or wasn't it?
None of domain in this email is hosted with us but there are thousand of emails day some body blast in our queue. We are failed to detect. We have enabled phpnobody spam logging but failed to get track of this user.
how to catch this spammer. There are no clues of to catch him.
[root@sm4 ~]# /root/qmHandle -m3261696
-------------- MESSAGE NUMBER 3261696 -------------- Received: (qmail 7056 invoked from network); 16 May 2007 05:34:18 -0500 Received: from axicom.net (HELO User) (67.112.176.250) by 14.32.5446.static.theplanet.com with SMTP; 16 May 2007 05:34:18 -0500 Reply-To: <notice@boamilitary.com> From: "Bank of America Military Bank"<notice@boamilitary.com> Subject: Notification from Bank of America Military Bank Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 04:44:51 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="Windows-1251" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 1 X-MSMail-Priority: High X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
None of domain in this email is hosted with us but there are thousand of emails day some body blast in our queue. We are failed to detect. We have enabled phpnobody spam logging but failed to get track of this user.
how to catch this spammer. There are no clues of to catch him.
Now first I will say I have NO idea how such spamming works, how a punk can get on my server and sent emails out.
I have had a team to look at it they also did something, but now it happens again for the 5th time, what can i do, are there any software or tools one can use like a antivirus to check the server and how can I avoid such sh..
I just found posts every a few days from an apparent spammer "sagepowder" in my forum (not so popular and has nothing to do with skiing). The subject is always "new here".
The content is "Any snowboarders or skiiers on this forum? I am planning a trip to BC on a snowboarding trip next week" or "I am new here, just saying hello".
I checked the apache log and it doesn't seem to be a robot script posting this. i.e. it browses to the index page, picked up my hidden field that blocks robots, post new topic, the go back to index page.
What surprised me is that when I google this guy, I got 108,000 results with the same content on tons of forums! All with total post number of 1 or 2 on each forum: [url]
I recently moved web services for one of my hosted domains (let's call it example.com) from one server (let's call it .org) to another server (let's call it .net) example.com has been on .org for about 5 years. .org handled all example.com web services, and all email. I recently updated example.com's DNS record to point www.example.com and example.com to the .net server. I didn't change the MX record or mail.example.com to point to .net. Mail continues to be delivered normally to example.com on the .org server.
Except now spammers are hitting the .net server, e.g.
Is it normal practice for spammers to send dictionary attack based spam to a domain's server that doesn't even handle email? All the spam coming is clearly just random email addresses not based on anything that exsists at the domain, and most of the addresses are so very random I can't imagine they exsist anywhere.
For about a month or so now I have a domain I host under serious attack from what I think are spammers. It's a wordpress site, and they are getting big numbers of POST requests to the WordPress comments file, e.g.
Code:
POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1 It's a well distributed attack, and I'm doing well with some scripts I wrote to block the requests to the wp-comments-post.php file. The real comment file has long since been moved, so any POST to the file gets firewalled. It's several thousand IPs from all over the place.
I don't believe it's a malicious attempt to bring the site down, but I'm guessing it's a blog comment spammer that has something set wrong and he's pounding this site to death by accident. I could be wrong on that though.
Sometimes my clients install untrusted scripts to their account what causes spamming, because these scripts sending high number of spam emails. Is there an automatically way to disable php mail function, or disable the account temporary?