David Boone

F'n spammers

I'm developing a serious hatred for spammers.

My server's been a source of spam a couple times the last few weeks. It was simple to trace it down to a particular user on my server, a site with PHP forum software. PHP holes are hardly a surprise, so I quickly shut down the site (chmod -rx htdocs/) and emailed the site admin to upgrade their software before reenabling.

Figuring it was taken care of, I forgot about it.

But today, same thing. Shut down the site again and sent another email. I finally had some time to help try find the problem. Turned out to be a simple PHP bulk emailer that the spammers had installed last time they got in! A remarkably simple script, it simply presented an HTML form where the From, Subject, etc lines were filled in and a huge list of emails into a textarea.

Emails sent were mostly "Wells Fargo" and "Royal Bank" phishing emails. Landed me on some black lists I now gotta get off of. Gah, bloody criminals.

PCB's make it pretty

Before: and After:

The PCB's arrived from Bangkok, they work great! Much nicer than the prototype boards I hacked together.