Some wise thoughts mentioned in passing in this thread brought back a painful memory.

About 17 months ago. I got called in from vacation because the mail spool was filling up with bounced spam. In about an hour our 200MHZ box had gotten about 600 bounces of mis addressed spams.

Looking at the headers, it wasn't hard to narrow the problem down to a very early version of NMS FormMail.pl that I had installed. I guess my life is pretty good that this rates as one of its suckier moments.

I pulled the script. Then I upgraded to a later more secure version of NMS (checking the release notes!), I renamed the new script to SomethingElse.pl and pasted the following into FormMail.pl

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
# dummy script to honeypot Spammers

use strict;
use CGI;
my $foo=new CGI;
print $foo->header();
print "\n";
my $file="../upload/crack/fake/$$"."_".time().".txt";
Dump_CGI_Info($file);
sleep(5);
# takes current form and environment values
# and dumps htem to a file

sub Dump_CGI_Info {
    $file = shift;

    if ( !open( FH, '>>', $file ) ) { print "couldn't open $file\n"; r
+eturn; }

    my $cgi = new CGI;
    my $key;

    foreach $key ( sort keys %ENV ) {
        my $spaces = ' ' x ( 30 - length($key) );
        print FH "$key $spaces $ENV{$key}\n";
    }
    print FH "\n\n";
    no strict;
    $cgi->save(FH);
    use strict;
}
[download]

I get probed every couple weeks. I guess it isn't hard to google for "formmail.pl" and (sadly) I can imagine system administrators with even less clue than me and my crew. Some folks might not notice much more than a sudden and permanent increase in disc activity...

update: fixed typos

email: mandog

---

In reply to FormMail.pl trauma memories by mandog

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.