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pytheas22
October 26th, 2009, 04:12 AM
This isn't an Ubuntu-specific question, but I'm hoping someone here might be able to help me out all the same.

I have a public website, coded in PHP, that allows visitors to send email via a form. The code that sends the email is located in a file named 'send_mail.php' and looks like this:


<?php
$to = 'recipient1@address.com' . ', ';
$to .= 'recipient2@address.com' . ', ';
$to .= 'recipient3@address.com' . ', ';

$subject = "Mail from website";
$message = $_POST["message"];
$sender_email = $_POST["sender_email"];
$sender_name = $_POST["sender_name"];
$message = "You have received the following message from $sender_name, $sender_email, via the website: $message";
mail($to, $subject, $message);
$mail_success = "yes";

include "contact.php";

?>


'contact.php' includes this HTML:


<p><strong>Use this form to send email:</strong></p>
<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="send_mail.php">
<p><input class="side" type="text" value="your name" name="sender_name" /></p>
<p><input class="side" type="text" value="your email" name="sender_email" /></p>
<p><textarea class="side" name="message" cols="70" rows="10"></textarea></p>
<p><input class="button" value="Send" type="submit" /></p>
<p><input class="button" value="Reset" type="reset" /></p>
</form>

Recently, I've been getting a number of emails from the website that contain the following:


login solidarity%0A%0aadd $sender_email $sender_name%0A%0aend

and nothing else. I'm a bit puzzled about why these are appearing. Over the last year, I've been receiving one or two a month and didn't think much of them, but in the last week I've been getting several a day. I'm worried that someone may be trying to do something nasty, like HTML injection. But I'm also not much of a programmer, so maybe this has a less sinister explanation that will be obvious to people with more programming experience. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd really appreciate them, and thanks in advance for engaging in a non-Ubuntu topic.

wmcbrine
October 26th, 2009, 05:18 AM
Dunno, but it kinda looks more like a broken spambot. Whether that's "less sinister", I'll leave up to you.

NoaHall
October 26th, 2009, 01:06 PM
I'd add a validation system to make sure none of the fields are blank, and that the email address is in the right format.

pytheas22
October 27th, 2009, 02:19 AM
Thanks for the helpful suggestions. A broken spambot makes a lot of sense. I'll see if adding a simple captcha test solves the problem. I'll also add code to validate email addresses and check for blank fields; I'm sure that won't hurt.