Contact Form Spam Attack: An Innocent Feature Caused a Massive Problem
How a simple “Send a copy to yourself” feature led to 149,700 spam emails and what you can do to prevent it
The Emergency Call
It started like many server emergencies do – with a panicked message about massive server performance issues. A client’s website was grinding to a halt, CPU usage was through the roof, and something called dovecot/lmtp was consuming enormous resources. But this wasn’t just a performance problem – it was the beginning of uncovering a sophisticated spam operation hiding in plain sight.
