Formmail Renaming

How much does it help?

[Visit Thailand]

I was trying to find a recent post on formmail problems etc but could not.

Anyway in that thread someone suggested renaming the formmail to something else like X76dsnsjsj.cgi basically just not FormMail or formmail etc.

My question is how much will this help? I understand having formmail under any name is not the best option but does renaming help at all?

[jatar_k]

yes it does, a lot of the bots look for it by name so it does help.

[Visit Thailand]

Brilliant thanks jatar_K would you recommend anything specific like for example leaving it in the main cgi-bin directory or perhaps adding a new directory within the cgi-bin and placing it there etc.

It is .cgi

[Slade]

Click rename, and hit 7 or 8 random keys on your alpha and numeric pads.

At that point, a spambot would have to try 3 things:

1) Look for "formmail.cgi" exactly, then go about it's way elsewhere.

2) Examine all your pages looking for a formmail fingerprint.(a form with email, subject, text, contact or other key words in it) Then submit against that form and see what happens. Plausible, but I don't think it's being done.

3) Run rand() a half a million times looking for the combination that reveals the real name of your script. More likely to be caught by you and banned by IP or useragent or some other manner before it ever found your script.