Website Optimization and Promotion

I was recently called in to stop a server attack in progress. The perpetrators were bombing a phpBB forum with a really bad setup in place. Simple tweaks like requiring users to have an account before posting messages and requiring them to verify email before they could post quieted the rebellion.

Another useful method to quiet the attack was catching IPs through the admin features of phpBB and then blocking IPs through the .htaccess file. I was also able to use the .htaccess to redirect 403-UnAuthorized server errors to a script that logs a whole load of information about every future attempt of this sort of server access. This log keeps a record of each attempt to access the server and includes information on the IP address, the page requested, date/time stamp, and any information the perpetrator may have been trying to pass to the server in order to ’sneak’ access into the site. There is some other info stored here, but I don’t want to give away all of my secrets on this topic

Back to phpBB: it has some great security features to make sure that when people try to bomb your forums with badwords and slanderous text, that you have some recourse in finding out “whodunnit” and helping your attempts to stop it. There is a badwords filter in phpBB that can be used to replace lists of badwords with text of your choice… this can be anything from weird ascii (!#@%$&*#!) to ‘pretty’ words. Imagine the next arguement in your forum when someone explodes and calls somone a ‘nice’ ‘person’ instead of … well, you can guess.

Needless to say, there are many ways to help prevent your forum from being attacked by malicious users. Comptrio has dealt with this in the past and I look forward to helping your prevent or stop an attack in progress. Contact Comptrio today to help secure your forums and your entire website today, before they get you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 11:49 am and is filed under Suggested Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.