Mars Attacks!
My host seems to be under attack from some low-life scum-sucking leech trying to spam through my web server. Very odd. I’m getting thousands of hits every day since yesterday from five machines with IP addresses in the 216.144.230.51 through 216.144.230.56 range, all requesting a file named "CONNECT [random IP address here]:25 HTTP/1.0". Port 25 is SMTP, where e-mail is sent, so it’s clear that these hosts are trying to hijack my server to spam, but they’re apparently too stupid to find an actual SMTP server. My web server supposedly won’t allow them to access SMTP. Oddly, though, until I blocked access in my .htaccess file to the IP addresses they’re using, every request would return a 200 code and 32632 characters. When I try to access the URLs they’re trying, I get a 404. So I wonder what they are getting (or were; now they get a 403 code and 198 characters, so that should save some of my bandwidth quota....) I contacted my hosting company, who are very proactive about spamming, and they said they looked into it and the hits aren’t having their presumed desired effect. They didn’t seem worried. But these hits are filling my logs with krep: more than 15,000 hits since 7:30 am yesterday, and no sign of stopping despite the fact that they ain’t gettin’ no love here. Bastards.
I wonder what kind of server does accept such a goofy URL and allow leeches to spam....
Posted at 8:23 AM