From: John <j_p_waterhouse@hotmail.com> Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:33:41 +0000

John wrote:

Hello,

We're running mailman 2.

Quite a few script kiddies and other idiots have figured out that they can use our mailman installation to annoy people.

I saw a subscribe flood too on my Mailman2, to sub. all lists on server, I had assumed it was preparatory to a spam flood later, but it could have been to annoy a 3rd party innocent.

They bypass the subscribe page directly, and run cgi-bin/subscribe directly - many, many times.

I didnt have time to analyse mine.

We fixed the problem by removing the appropriate executable permission from cgi-bin/subscribe and rewriting the list info page to handle subscriptions differently. (We removed the Subscribe fields and button.)

While this works, it's inelegant and a bit convoluted.

Is there another way to prevent this, and leave the default info page intact?

A half baked idea: Hack the mailman install scripts to rum a random key generator, & that random key include in generated html pages & cgi install paths eg cgi-bin/random1234random/subscribe It would make dumb script attacks a lot more time comsuming, smart attack scripts would have to become more complex, adapting per host or list name.

Better would be encrypted keys.

I wonder if MM3 have already solved this.

Sorry I have no time to experiment, I'm in mid move.

Cheers,

Julian Stacey. http://berklix.org/jhs/mail/ Gmail fails. http://StolenVotes.UK Arm Ukraine. Contraception V. global warming. http://nao.org.uk/topics/brexit/ BRoken EXIT: BRitain EXcluded Impacts Trade.