From: Alan Olsen <alan@ctrl-alt-del.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 21:58:56 -0700 (PDT)
To: bdurham@swbell.net
Subject: Re: How to pick up email addresses from a feedback form??
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19970421165922.43e76ca4@pop.mindspring.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970421215659.00a2bbb0@mail.teleport.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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At 06:22 PM 4/21/97 -0500, Brian Durham wrote:
>Thomas Porter wrote:
>> I have a technical question:
> 
>> Is there another way to do this?  Could a third-party spammer, for
example,
>> capture email addresses posted to such a form?
>
>Having written a few thousand lines of CGI source, I can see a couple of
>possible of things happening. First, it could be as innocent as the CGI
>program
>(the program that acts on the form's data) is hosted at the bbb.com
>site.
>The person at aaa.com may not have permissions to execute cgi-bin
>programs
>(or not know how to set them up).  I see this as most likely.

Or they may have switched sites and have not changed over the back end code
to the new site.

>Unfortunately, the ultimate answer is in the CGI program at bbb.com ...
>it would be nice to see its source to see if it was [horror!] hacked to
>e-mail the contents of the form to aaa.com and bbb.com.

You can always look at the source of the page and see what sites are
contacted.   Look at the form tag and see where the cgi code is located.

>Packet-sniffing is always possible [not my area of expertise], but who
>would go
>to all that trouble just to get e-mail addresses to add to their SPAM
>list?

If there was a packet sniffer on the line, you would not see it.  Packet
sniffers are PASSIVE.  They just sit and read traffic and record the
interesting (or not so interesting) bits.

>Our hacker friends can probably shed some more light on this also.

Why worry about e-mail addresses being diverted?  If you don't want them to
find you out, don't give out your address.

"The first rule of not being seen is DON'T STAND UP!"
 
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