Unusual contact form activity

spam, contact form, php

[brancook]

I have a contact form setup on our website that I made using php. The customer fills out the form then I'm automatically emailed the information when they click submit. I've gotten a number of very odd contacts as of late. I just seems like someone or something is just typing in a bunch of nonsense. Like this:

First Name: lekqmapucxm
Last Name: lekqmapucxm
Title: GjeSwPab
Email:
Company: luIwqpiaSSnGmi
Phone: nBbXSzKnoHzINY
Fax: tqOPQoONhAAm
Address: sWPOkeJexInaV
City: FNGmRatDgrFCI
State: iOVnHvTOXI
Zip: SkKWHVBClL
Country: RGDSrwGzDVIyPQzUTwv

Then in the message section there is a bunch of links but the links are even just a bunch of letters with a .html at the end. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

[Pico_Train]

yep, plenty of those. You could put a catcha in or a simple sum checker with php to make sure the input is by a "human".

[brancook]

Could that be a robot of some sort just trying to spam?

[d40sithui]

most def

[brancook]

What could it be trying to do?

[d40sithui]

well, bots usually spam to advertise and bring higher traffic for their owner's website. of course, there could be other reasons to do so as well, but this is the usual case. this bot may be just testing your security counter-measures and/or trying to fill up your db with junk...just cuz it can. if this continues, you may want to block the ip or implement some kind of captcha/email validation

[brancook]

I don't want to post the links up on the forum but the even the links don't seem to make any sense. It just looks like randomly typed urls. I don't have the information currently going into a database it's just emailed. on average we get about 50 contact a month through the web form. I should start inserting the info. into a database though so these are easier to track.

[Rosalind]

This is getting more common. The reason the links don't make sense is because they want to be able to search for them later, to find out whether the comment is auto-approved and the text is indexed. Just put in a text captcha with a question unique to your site (ie, not maths), that should stop this sort of thing.