Sahil Tandon wrote:
On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, jeffs wrote:
There is the slight potential for abuse by these logged in users that
one or two may figure out a way to send spam through this system by
forging (not login) credentials that the database uses to sort out
outbound email.
This is really shady. Why can't you secure the system?
I'm developing a system that examines the apache logs for a particular
string of characters, which only occasionally are present in the URLs --
very rarely. Actually, the presence of those strings, is the mechanism
that kicks off a script that sends email to an email address. Now, it is
difficult but not impossible for someone to calculate what those strings
may be. If they guess right, they could flood my apache logs with those
strings and thereby kick off a flurry of alerts to an email address.
Sorry if I'm sounding cryptic here but this is a development project and
I'm not free to completely divulge all aspects of how it works. What's
important, is that postfix handles the outbound alerts and could
possibly be tricked into sending out a bunch of email alerts to an email
address and I don't want that to happen because then my legitimate
system is marked as a spam generator when it is not.
Now I could run an sql query that counts the number of times the URLs
are present in the logs (the logs are actually saved in a MySQL
database) within a specified window of time, and stop the script from
kicking of the alerts that way. However, rather than building (for me)
a difficult query I thought there might be a mechanism in Postfix which
could be used to stop a sudden increase of outbound emails.
