Kazel "Hi Webmaster"?

[flhu]

Anyone else get a reoccurring, fairly annoying entry in their web forms from "Kazelxxx" (where x's are random characters) with the message "Hi Webmaster"?

Anyone know just what it is they want to achieve by doing this?

[kgun]

I don't know that service. Can you please explain.

[danlefree]

You have a rogue mailer script.

There is a good chance that your mailer form may also be used to send spam if you are running any out-of-date software or using custom scripts which do not sufficiently validate user input before sending mail.

If you are using Linux and PHP (with shell access), you may want to check out the find and secure rogue php mail scripts guide I wrote a few years back.

[flhu]

Luckily, there's no way for the form to send out mail to anyone other than us. While it tries to send web addresses and html code in the comment field, I have the site not allow them; won't even send us the message and then tells the user that we don't allow it. Eventually their script gives up and just says "Hi" ...The script is fairly stupid, and gives plenty of ammunition to filter out (which I won't go into in case "Kazel" is Google's this.) But it changes a little every once in a while. Just yesterday it tried without anything other than attempt to send the word "viagra"

It's just a nuisance. I was wondering how prevalent this particular one is.

[danlefree]

If you are comfortable working with your contact form's script, I highly recommend the free ReCAPTCHA service.

[flhu]

I had thought about that, and have even coded a captcha function from scratch to use if it gets really bad, but I never implemented it because we prefer to rather deal with the spam than do anything to inconvenience legitimate users.

but I agree, reCaptcha is cool and a good service, not just for the webmaster, but for humanity as well.