Better Living Through Thinking

Fun Ways to Aggravate Spammers

Mon, 19 Jul 2004

Fun Ways to Aggravate Spammers: This entry falls under the "useless but fun to do" category of spam thwarting techniques.

Several months ago, I was scanning my Apache web logs for anything funny. I found entries like this:

xx.xx.xx.xx - - [27/Jan/2004:06:44:05 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 403 307

Some poor schmuck looking for an open formmail.pl relay on my server. I honestly felt pity for the guy; 403 and 404 errors all day long can really take the wind out of your sails. So I decided to give the troller something useful to read (repetition is the key to learning):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print <<_HTML_;
<html>
<head>
<title>FormMail.pl</title>
</head>
<body>
_HTML_
for (1..500) {
    print "You are stupid.<br>\n" x 1000;
    select(undef, undef, undef, .25);
}
print <<_HTML_;
</body>
</html>
_HTML_
exit;

This brief Perl script has brought me joy; my desire is that it brings formmail.pl trollers joy also. The script, when completely finished, returns an HTML page approximately 10,000,000 bytes long (10MB) and it takes about 2 minutes to do that (the select statement slows things down, so all the joy does not come at once).

The above script is linked to the following files in my cgi-bin directory now:

BFormMail.pl
FormMail.pl
comments.pl
contact.cgi
contact_us.pl
formmail.cgi
formmail.pl
mailform.pl
nether-mail.pl
register.pl
sendmail.cgi
sendmail.pl

Now my trolling friends get entries like this in my Apache log:

63.208.149.200 - - [06/Jul/2004:16:42:25 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 10000073
  216.234.203.132 - - [09/Jul/2004:13:42:18 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 516071
   66.54.3.245 - - [10/Jul/2004:00:51:31 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.1" 200 53321
  209.183.136.159 - - [10/Jul/2004:03:08:41 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 10000073
   67.94.60.18 - - [11/Jul/2004:09:34:55 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 114663
  64.14.144.85 - - [12/Jul/2004:19:51:11 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.1" 200 69735
  216.123.219.194 - - [13/Jul/2004:19:21:06 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 90087
 64.65.191.117 - - [13/Jul/2004:21:24:52 -0600] "POST /cgi-bin/mailform.pl HTTP/1.0" 200 81895

What a nice feeling it is to turn 403 and 404 HTTP errors into productive 200 HTTP responses, and just look at the bytes sent in the past month!

[ category: /spam | link: 040719122710 ]

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