CogBlog

In 1997 I co-founded COGBOX in with Michelle DeCol. Since then we've offered online marketing, web development and corporate and brand identity to a wide range of clients. Here I post thoughts and comments on search marketing, recent projects, and other things I find interesting.

Are your contact forms being hijacked?

Published Tuesday, October 11, 2005 by chris | E-mail this post

I've notice that a lot of our clients, and our contact forms on COGBOX.com have been targets of spammers lately. They are trying to use client contact forms to anonymously send email from our servers.

The process is to insert MIME mail headers into your message body in a contact form. If the script behind the form is not careful it can easily create an autoreply message that looks like it should be going out to the spammers list instead of to you or the person submitting the form. Or, they could even be trying to infect your mail server with a nasty virus. Basically, they hijack your contact forms for their own devious purposes.

Usually the form address is a random string of numbers and letters such as Xnmszgza@cogbox.com. The spammer will run through each field of your form trying to find one that will just pass through their alternate headers unchanged.

So, if you notice a lot of strange messages from odd email addresses lately, and if you are getting angry messages from people saying "why have you sent me this email for cheap viagra" you may have a problem.