The Core Dump
It updates the blog, or it gets the hose again.
The assault continues
The zombie assault on this domain continues unabated. We’ve managed to staunch the bleeding with some draconian firewall rules–going to have to revisit those rules later on and start letting huge chunks of the Internet back in.
Did I ever mention that it really, really sucks to have to waste time and effort on this crap? I did? Good. Because it very much does.
The vast majority of the spam comes in this form:
thecoredump.org 24.42.40.x - - [21/Jan/2005:15:49:32 -0700] “GET http://www.search1search.net/index.php?uid=968&REQ=Debt HTTP/1.1” 200 13814 “http://free.7host06.com/alangef/NetMoney/search1search.html” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313”
with various IPs, user agents, and requests to sundry perverted sites. So in order to at least not let the crap get through to other sites, we added this to the local .htaccess file:
| RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET | HEAD | POST)\ /?http:// [NC]RewriteRule .* - [F] |
After this, all incoming requests to fully qualified URLs (i.e., they start with http:// are forbidden. If nothing else, it makes Apache have to work much less hard, and hopefully it will keep this domain off other people’s blacklists. It also doesn’t seem to affect the functionality of the site, but please let me know if something’s broken now.
Incidentally, I am now 100% in favor of the death penalty for the assholes who perpetrate this kind of crap.
UPDATE: Changing the .htaccess file seems to have done the trick. Some of the zombies aren’t giving up, but the load is currently hovering around two requests per second. The machine is no longer spawning a new httpd daemon for each request, so memory and CPU are no longer scarce resources.
Turned off all the firewall rules as well, which made me feel like less of an angry fascist.
**Soundtrack: **“Long Way From Home” by Fatboy Slim 
Posted Saturday, 22 January, 2005 by Nic Lindh
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Springsteen gives a concert in Phoenix. It’s fantastic.
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