[Mailman-Users] tremendous horror!

[Scott Courtney]

On Sunday 16 June 2002 05:53 am, Joern Nettingsmeier wrote:
> Adam Frank wrote:
> > I have been running a list for some time now, and recently seemingly
> > random subscription confirmations are being sent to people on the
> > list. Some people are reporting recieving over a dozen confirmations a
> > day (you know, the "Confirm xxxxxxxxx")! Does anyone know what could be
> > causing this, because it is really annoying the heck out of the people on
> > my list!
>
> my guess is some troll is subscribing other people's addresses. that's
> what the confirm msgs are supposed to catch. probably not mailman's
> fault.

At one time, I was the admin of a site that offered free e-mail accounts. We
had to discontinue the service because of trolls doing things like this. One
person -- and I use that word loosely -- wrote a Perl (or similar) script to
create bogus accounts. They had created over 10,000 bogus accounts on the
system in just a couple of days. There were several such trolls doing similar
things. We could stop them, one by one, but we decided it was eating too much
of our staff time for something that wasn't a revenue generator for the
company. So we reluctantly discontinued the service.

Joern has a good point, based on my experiences with such things. My advice is
to check your weblogs to see if the subscription page for the list has
excessive hits from a single IP address. If so, consider using a firewall rule
to block that IP address from your server. Someone who would do this kind of
trolling might also try other, more malicious, things.

Scott

-- 
-----------------------+------------------------------------------------------
Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
courtney at 4th.com       | having a bad operating system."    -- Linus Torvalds
http://4th.com/        | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)