PHPJunkyard support forum

Posted: **Thu Apr 10, 2008 10:30 pm**

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Hi
I have been using HESK now for over 3 years at my school and find it very useful...staff are also very positive regarding its ease of use etc. Being a Govt school, we are unable to choose our hosting service, and unfortunately the one we are forced to use does not permit the use of ip blocklists etc. Anyway, once every 6 months or so the Hesk site gets hammered with spam, most of it sexual in nature. The content is really not the issue, rather it is a bit of a pain weeding through the legitimate and spam responses. Is there anyway I can beef up with the SPAM protection in hesk...even if it is a third party addon. The hosting service does not use apache but is rather some version of SUN OS, but they will not disclose exactly what software it is running. Many thanks for your time.

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:18 am**

I know what you mean, I am running a copy of the script on my test server which is getting spammed and where I am testing different anti-SPAM approaches. After a number of tests I figured that some spammers have OCR software that are able to read the Hesk security image, which is quite simple for compatibility reasons.

Anyway, for the recent test all I did was swap colors in the security image (background black and digits white) and it blocks the bots for now. You can try this yourself, just open file secimg.inc.php in a plan text editor (Notepad, Wordpad) and change lines 56 and 57 from

Code: Select all

            $background_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
            $text_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);

to

Code: Select all

            $background_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
            $text_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);

Now, I know this is not a permanent solution, but give it a try and see if it helps. The next version should have some new protection available.

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2008 9:08 am**

cheers...will give it a go and see if it makes a difference. Will post back my results. Thanks again

Posted: **Fri May 30, 2008 5:03 pm**

I work closely with a school, and they've decided to install Hesk on their internal web/intranet server - works faster (lan not wan), and the only spamming comes from the students - which are easy enough to block from accessing the hesk system.

Posted: **Sat May 31, 2008 5:36 am**

Since making the changes listed above, Spam has stopped. I was getting all types of spam with weird url links and random sexually explicit words originating from outside IP addresses....Thanks heaps for the suggestion!!!

PHPJunkyard support forum

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