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VB stops spammer in his tracks.

A stark reminder of the ingenuity of spammers was received by VB's web team last month thanks to a brief incident involving the VB web server. Suspicions of nefarious activity were first aroused when a significantly large number of emails began to overwhelm the email server. On inspection, the emails appeared to have been sent by the web server. Quick to respond, VB's web developer immediately blocked port 25 of the web server to prevent any further emails being sent while he investigated the anomaly.

It transpired that a badly written perl script was the root of the problem. The code - written a number of years ago by a long-since departed member of the web team - was intended to allow visitors to the website to email articles they found particularly interesting/relevant to friends or colleagues. Unfortunately, however, the 'email this article to a friend' feature might better have been described as 'email this article to several thousand friends', since no limit had been placed on the number of addresses to which to send the message. Needless to say, the script was swiftly removed and normal service resumed.

01 May 2007

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