Let me clear something up for you. I’m not making a point here as a point of debate or who is right or who is wrong, or whether it’s the term exploit doesn’t apply to the methodology used for nefarious bombardment of a server. Define it as you will, quit frankly I don’t give a hoot.

What I do care about is knowing how and when the server is being brought or has been brought to its knees.

As has been stated and UNDERSTOOD, that all cgi script can be used to exploit – no... be used to nefariously bombard a server and bring it to its knees. It would be prudent for the coders to apply a routine in their scripts that picks up on such things and reports those results in the administrative area of the program.

Someone has executed the nefarious bombardment of my server for who knows how long and repeatedly, bringing my server to its knees. I could not isolate the source, Now I know better. I can watch for it in the logs now.

I was finally able to pin it down after months of plowing through my server logs, large 200 MB server logs at times. Until I finally extracted all instances of the word Avatar, and found out how my server was being exploited,

With a practical routine encoded in the script reporting that an IP may be flooding the server with repeated requests hits on the same cgi routine. I could have isolated this problem months ago.

I have spent countless hours trying to pinpoint what it was that was exploiting my servers resources. YES I USED THAT WORD AGAIN.

I understand exactly what has been said here, It would also seem the onus is on the owner of the message board and his server when the UBB script or any CGI is used to crash it.

I am not blaming UBB for this.

If the point is we know about it, and we’re not going to do anything about it because the same can be done with other scripts, then fine, stand in parallel with the rest. Somehow I would have thought that UBB would want to step out and step up to the challenge of making their product far more superior than that.

[This message was edited by MovingPictures on July 19, 2003 at 09:57 AM.]