Anybody getting big increase in form spammers?

Lots and lots of "contact" emails are being sent

[mblair]

The last few days I've been getting a lot of spam from the Contact Us forms on a number of my websites -- sometimes as much as 50 a day.

These websites have little in common -- some use PHP, some ColdFusion. All form fields are filled out with random characters like "[e-mail]", which is getting past required field checks and submitting the form. In some cases it seems that a multipart attachment is trying to be sent via the comments box.

From this it appears the attacks are trying to bcc a 3rd party random email address.

Anyone seeing a big uptick in this lately and have ideas on how to reduce/eliminate these in general?

[victor]

The ones I've seen are all coming in via anonymous proxies.

I've protected my forms (but not other pages) by no longer allowing access to them by anonymous proxies. Which seems reasonable to me: a passing surfer can stay as anonymous as they like. But try to talk to me, and I want a path back to where you are talking from.

If the attacks you see are not from AP IPs, then complain to their ISP.

(Actually, you could complain to the ISP of the AP too, but with less effect)

[Corey Bryant]

We added an image verification to the forms that seemed to help

-Corey

[pkoutoul]

I am seeing the exact same thing! I have been scratching my head trying to figure out what they are truying to accomplish.

I like the random image thing -- where can I get a php script to do that?

Also, how exactly do you keep out anonymous proxies?