Question

So I’m getting an error:

501 Method Not Implemented
POST to /newbooks.php not supported.

The code works fine, except when I pass (via POST) new-line characters, in which case I get the above error. Here is the form

<form method="post" action="?action=addnewbooks&amp;submit=validate">
    <Textarea name="newbooklist" rows="30" cols="68"></textarea>
    Password: <input type="password" name="password" size="8" maxlength="50"></input>
    <button type="submit" name="Submit">Submit</button>
</form>

A sample of what I’m pasting in below.

Heartwishes : an Edilean novel / Jude Deveraux|Deveraux, Jude|2011|9781439108000 (hbk.)|  Kill me if you can : a novel / by James Patterson and Marshall Karp|Patterson, James|2011|9780316097543| Murder by mocha / Cleo Coyle|Coyle, Cleo|2011|9780425241431 (hbk.)|

I can clean the data up once it’s passed to the second page of the form, but I’m not sure what I can do since it’s crapping out before it passes the data to the validation page. The data that is being pasted in the form is actually a huge report (full of duplicates to) that is auto-generated. Edited to add: I’m reasonably certain it’s the James Patterson book that is causing the problem, but I can’t see where the problem is.

EDIT: So James Patterson is a 1337 hacker. Since I know what the problem is, now it’s just a matter of finding a solution. Since the list is all of the books added to the library’s collection in the last week, we’re sure to more titles that start with kill. Are there other words that are likely to make modsecurity think it’s an SQL attack? What can I do to pre-clean the data to deal with this kind of thing?

Answer 1

So turns out this is triggering our server’s firewall. It sees %0D%0AKill in the POST data and thinks it’s a System Command Injection.