Botspotter's a wee bit down

[sarahk]

Hurrah to the hackers! Another victory

Sorry Shawn, sidetracking the forum a bit here. I just wanted to start a thread my users can use to post questions.

Botspotter started life as a tool to help me see quickly if my site was being indexed and whether I needed to spend the dollars and buy submission software. Quickly found I didn't and Botspotter blossomed.

Since Xmas it's been available to anyone and nearly 200 people have signed up. Not earth shattering numbers but that's not what it's about.

I've tried to create a small index of all the bots that visit and grade them 1-5 in importance and some get noted as mail washers - the bots that steal email addresses.

Very quickly the botspotter site (but not the others) started getting pinged by bots with scrambled user_agents. I noted them but never took any steps to block them.

My passiveness must have been annoying because yesterday I had a fairly vigorous attack which stopped the logging. I'm going to drip feed it back on but this week I don't have much time.

Sarah

[WhiteGyr]

I've been looking for a service like your's - hope you get the problem under control soon, I'd like to join in.

We have had a serious email account Spoofing from a hacker disguising the source address of a message by replacing the actual address in the message with a different address. When the message is received at its destination, the message includes the wrong source address. Usually, there are BAD things in these emails (virsus, porn, etc.) and they indicicate they come from us.

[Foxy]

We have been getting those too - even coming to us from us!!

Do you have a solution?

[WhiteGyr]

That's how we discovered the "Spoofing" our email account, we started receiving emails from our server (legitimate email addresses) that were not sent from either that server or the individual. We have not resolved the problem. We dropped that email address from our web site, server and sent notices out to all the contacts that were known to use it that it was no longer in use. We are drafting a notice to publish on our “about” page which will describe this problem. The site: http://www.millersmiles.co.uk/index.htm has some good info on the problem.

[Foxy]

Hi that is what we have done also

Closed the accounts being hit.

On the web site we changed the @ to @ whenever we have to write it.

It is a p in the a!

[sarahk]

I've reopened the "shop", still lots to do but it's logging again and taking new users.

[Foxy]

Sorry Sarahk but its giving this

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: opentable() in /www/virtual/pcpm/htdocs/botspotter/modules/Your_Account/index.php on line 1356

[sarahk]

Thanks for that. All sorted now.

[Foxy]

Sorry about this but

got thru to new account and received the email

went back to activate and got the New User page activated with the click on this link to login

which I did

and got from this page

http://bots.pcpropertymanager.com//account.html

this message

The requested URL //account.html was not found on this server

Don't you just love easter presents! :)

[sarahk]

Aaaah, thanks. There was // where there should have been /

IE was forgiving normally but not on that link. Strange. Still, fixed now, thanks for the heads up!

[Foxy]

I don't do IE

Safari is me :D