Unwanted garbage entry into HTML form via bot?

Question

I have a website on which I have a work section. I allow candidates to fill out online job applications. No login required. Data entry is stored in the database.

I did NOT put any captcha or bot locking mechanism in the HTML form. I understand that this is stupid. But my site is small, and I did not spend too much time programming.

Each time I see garbage entries in the fields of the application form, such as:

yRERRCEXEUOMCew

Several times the City field in the data would have a valid input (for example, New York)

I’m trying to figure out where this entry came from and what would anyone win by doing this.

thanks

Answer 1

It comes from spam bots, and they simply provide random information to check if it is a working form or can send email, etc. If you are looking for a non-intrusive method (that is, not CAPTCHA or JavaScript) to prevent spam bots from submitting dummy data, I would highly recommend applying for throttling. If you use PHP, you can use this code:

 // Sessions needed to tie forms to specific users
 session_start ();

 // Process form here
 if (isset ($ _ POST ['submit']))
 {
     $ now = time ();
     // See if the current time less the start time is less than or equal to 5 seconds
     if (($ now - $ _SESSION ['start_time']) 

Note. This will not stop the allocated bots and will not provide any real security. This will stop the automatic bots on the thread, although they will not normally wait 5 seconds between messages.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I'm trying to figure out where this input comes from?

It can come from anywhere, the user can also enter this, since your application does not check this entry.

and that someone would win by doing this.

No idea

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You can put captcha. or just you can add two attributes

allows

1.98 and one operation sign (e.g. + ) allow the user to perform and verify this @server thing.

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Also see

• CAPTCHA Image-Based Practical Approaches