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  1. #1
    John E is offline Elite Member Power Poster
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    Web Form Fillers

    Our products work for 30 days before requiring the user to register. It's a crude (but reasonably effective) way of deterring piracy. At the end of the 30 days a dialog box pops up with a hyperlink. Clicking on the hyperlink takes the customer to our online web form where he can fill in his details (name / email address / order number etc) and we'll then send him his license.

    Quite regularly (about once every 6 days) I receive a small batch of submissions that are always filled with garbage data. Invariably there are five submissions each time. I assume that someone must have written some kind of app to trawl the internet looking for web forms which it then submits using garbage data for some unknown reason. It's been happening for about 3 months now and is little more than an irritation. There are only ever 5 submissions, all within a few seconds of each other, once every six days - but if I was getting thousands of submissions per day it would be a major ballache!

    Apart from the obvious (being an imbecile with too much time on his hands) what would motivate someone to write such an app - whose only purpose seems to be to irritate someone they don't even know? Is there some potential way that the author could gain from writing an app like that
    Last edited by John E; February 26th, 2014 at 04:48 AM.
    "A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” - Charles F. Kettering

  2. #2
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    Sounds like a bot. I'd put a timer to delay them for 30 seconds to see if that helps. Nobody submits more than one do they? Make it 30 hours!
    David

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  3. #3
    John E is offline Elite Member Power Poster
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    Yeah, or I suppose the other option is to add one of those "captcha" utilities to our form. Although they can be annoying for a genuine user I can fully understand why they've become so popular. What I don't understand is what motivates someone to write or run one of those bots in the first place.

    Errr - unless it's the same company that markets the captcha software...

    Hmmm... I think I've started to become paranoid.!
    "A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” - Charles F. Kettering

  4. #4
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    could be part of a "botnet" using common pitfalls/bugs in form entry to get control of your server and add it to it's nodes.

  5. #5
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    Quote Originally Posted by John E View Post
    What I don't understand is what motivates someone to write or run one of those bots in the first place.
    because your computer has value to someone that can control it.


    THey get internet bandwidth to send spam email or to DoS attacks or similar
    THey can do their evil deeds completely anonymous since if "they" get caught, they only found a node in the botnet with no trace back to it's root.
    They have CPU power which can be monetized in many ways (such as bitcoin or other e-currency mining, cracking crypto keys etc)

    And it costs the botnet "owner" nothing in electricity, internet fees, or hardware costs.

  6. #6
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    Some men just want to watch the world burn, but as John said, a small captcha will do the job, as long as you don't use a complicated one, everybody got used to this.
    reCAPTCHA with their book digitalization goal is the cutest, I think.

  7. #7
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    Re: Web Form Fillers

    captcha's help, but on a popular enough site, even those are increasingly being "crowd hacked". (i.e. either cheap labour forces in developing countries doing this as a job or people are being given 'costless' value (getting some gold coins in a game for example) for solving them).

    There's OCR software that break some captcha's
    and some hacks use the 'read captcha over sound' feature for the disabled to use voice recognition instead of OCR.

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