Sam Spade Tracks The Evil Doers Down
So some bozo was filling up my guestbook with stupid comments just now - in Spanish. I'm not sure what this guy's deal was or which one of my rants pissed him off but he didn't quit for over an hour.
I don't have instant-access to the banned-ip list on my shared Linux server I'm using so while I was waiting for the email I sent off to my hosting provider JohnCompanies to take effect, I IMed Jim to see if he had any ideas how I could track down this IP or somehow retaliate...
Jim sent me a link to Sam Spade which is incredible. It gave me the name of the company the guy was working at AND a contact name and number for the person responsible for the network. So I called up the guy who's probably in charge of networking there, and I politely explained to him that somebody was having fun with my server and he understood completely (awesome) and after I gave him the IP, he said "he'd take care of it."
And it seems like he did, because the comments stopped. Nice. Thanks!
A couple lessons learned today. 1) You are not anonymous on the internet unless you're hooked up to some internet cafe somewhere. And 2) I've got to do some work on this box to shore up security on the comments a bit - I suspect many home grown blogging tools are similar. (Um, Please. Any junior hackers out there reading this. This isn't an invitation to fuck with my server, thank you, so don't get any ideas. I'll call your IT department too. ;-) )
-Russ