Guest Book under attack!!!

[bennymetal]

Over the past month or so I am getting bombarded with entries in my guest book. Most contain some jibberish or say something like nice work or great site and contain links to Viagra or porno sites. It seems whatever is doing this hits the guestbook directly through the url & not through the links in my site because my site meter is not picking up the activity. Anyway, I have been deleting the entries and puting the IPs in my blocked host list, but it seems that the more I block the more I get. I would appreciate anyt advice on how to stop this from happening. Thanks...

[Matt]

Are you running the latest version? Blocking the IPs is going to be a waste of your time, these sscript kiddies and joe-jobbers move from host to host exploiting scripts as soon as you can ban them, they find some one else with out-dated scripts.

[bennymetal]

I tried installing the upgrade but it bombed out, I figured I would rename the URL so they coudn't find me as easy and that didn't work. After a few hours of thrashing around I managed to drop my sql database & destroy my guestbook. I submitted a request to support to have my site rolled back but the request was bounced because I am not the owner of the site (just the admin). I sent an email to the owner & now I am waiting for the request to be worked. Once thats done, I will be back where I started.

[Matt]

Good trick! Renaming is always a good practice.

We do need the site contact in order to do site maintenance/rollbacks, but I think a rollback is a step in the wrong direction. I think you may have seen the ticket reply by now from the site contact.

In any case, we can try a rollback and see what happens, but if the installer conks out, you really should upgrade the script. Rolling back only puts you back at step "A."

You need to run the latest version to avoid hacks. All scripts are like an OS for your site. You would not run an outdated version of windows would you? Same goes for your site. If your software is old and moldy, so will be your site.