Soup of the Day

Pain, real and virtual (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blue tube)

So 2007 has started rather poorly. Firstly one of my molar teeth has decided to chip itself, although it did that back in Nice last August, and now it is dying a slow and very painful death. After some emergancy surgery I now know that I have to have more to finally kill the blighter and relieve the pain, then some crowning action should preserve it for life. Unfortunately they almost failed to mention the fact that they’re going to have to put me under a general anesthetic to do it, which is a little concerning. I’ll would go into detail at a later date, but I doubt I’m going to remember anything.

Elsewhere, one of my clients web sites was hacked this weekend and used to send about 40,000 spam messages before the server was switched off by the hosting company. After a lot of searching I found the security flaw in a web form, which the hacker had used to inject their own variables and send e-mails containing what ever they wanted to whom ever they liked.

There are many solutions to fixing these issues, but I wanted to solve this one myself rather than download someone elses code. For me this is the more rewarding side of programming for the web, outwitting the hackers determined to use my clients servers for spamming. For security I can’t go into too much detail, but the solution involves removing all mailing script functions from the public facing web site and then by using some clever pooling we will have a very secure system. Unfortunately one can never guarantee 100% security unless the computer is in a locked room with no network connections what-so-ever and you’re the only one with the key that you’ve just swallowed. At least that computer would be secure for 24 hours before you’d have to eat the key again.

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