Mon, 23 Jan 2006

Securing the Server

As if SPAM wasn't enough of a problem, my server has been putting up with dozens of malicious script-kiddies trying dictionary attacks. I counted 23,412 'Illegal user' login attempts in a day and a half - that's gotta be a load on the server, even if all of the logins ultimately fail. So I spent a couple of hours this morning and installed DenyHosts, which is really an excellent tool - it's already stopped three attacks today, before they could get started. It's flexible, too, and can run as a cron job or a daemon. If you run a Unix style server, get this installed. You'll sleep better...

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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