The Curse of Vulnerabilities!

[planetWayne]

It's been a while, and this has site has been ticking over for YEARS now - mostly with not a lot going on. Not that there hasn't been a lot going on but as the 'socials' start to take over the world, people running their own systems failed in to insignificance.

Anyways, what prompted this post was more that I was getting an occasional email from Google's crawler (yes it still has a go!) saying that pages on the site were not found or had bad urls! Whilst I've checked everything out to see where this could be found, turns out there was a web page that is part of one of the services used here that has the ability to return values or redirect to other parts of the system. Typically this, when a malformed set of parameters has been passed has the ability to return a URL that is off site... Now we all know where that's going, use a legit site to send people off to the unsavoury side. Not so good, and it drags your Google score down in the process.

Well, the short answer now (and thank goodness for Chat GPT as my PHP has rusted over a tad) was able to craft a patch that I can now use to trap if it is sending you 'out of town'. If it tries, you now just get bounced back to the home page. So if anyone did have bogus links, fear not, they now don't send you down the dark side.

Until the next one!