Title: SPAM attack through vulnerable PHP script
Topics: blog, Exim
Date: 2007-06-15

One of my customers reported this morning that their webserver was unusually slow. I discovered that it was abused for sending SPAM through web forms. The PHP script processing these forms lacked proper input sanitization. After disabling the script by renaming its mail function I deleted almost 1000 of SPAM emails from the queue:

xxx:/var/spool/exim4/input# grep -l "Email von yyy.zz:" *-D | perl -pe 's/-D$//' | xargs exim -Mrm