Happily Back from a Dictionary Attack

Wow. It’s really been a while since I’ve updated my blog! Miss you guys! There have been a lot of things that happened that got me to lay off from blogging for a while. One of which was a problem with my hosting.

My websites experienced a Dictionary attack. That basically means spammers send multiple emails in my site using random dictionary words as the email recipient. And because I’ve set my emails to catch all emails, every single emails from bots and spammers are processed which pushed my server to go crazy.

For example:
a@domain.com
b@domain.com
c@domain.com

So anyway, the catchall email is getting all those emails(AHHH!!!) so the mail system uses tons of resources to process all these emails which caused a serious problem on my hosting server.

How to Solve Dictionary Attacks

The way to completely stop these attacks dead in their tracks, is to go to your email settings and set the default email to :fail:, which can be done easily if you’re using cpanel like me. That way, any email that isn’t created fails right away. Which puts an end to the whole attack.

I hope this helps. Anyway, since my websites are back now, I’m upgrading my blogs to Wordpress 2.5.1 and I’ll be talking about lots of cool things. Stay tuned guys.

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