Central Blocklist (CBL) outage

[Syzop]

This night there was a spam wave and Central Blocklist (CBL) failed to catch it. Instead admins that use CBL got error messages in their UnrealIRCd logs and the spam went through. The TL;DR version is: i made a mistake in the server-side code of CBL and it is fixed now.

The long version:

Back in January 2025 I changed CBL to immediately auto-submit to DroneBL for spam that we are confident about(*). I didn't mention this publicly but this worked very well. Spam waves were stopped quickly, even before people noticing. What's nice about this is that it not only helps people who use CBL, but all IRC servers on the internet that use DroneBL (which are a lot), both UnrealIRCd and non-UnrealIRCd.

Now, later on (more recently) I changed a line in the code that submits to DroneBL and I made a typo. That was unnoticed until now. This night when the spam hit multiple networks CBL correctly identified the traffic as suspicious/spam, then when trying to submit the IP to DroneBL the bug was hit. This caused the script to crash/stop on that request. The result was not only failing to submit the IP to DroneBL but also failing to mark the traffic as spam to the UnrealIRCd server querying CBL. The server would report back a 500 error to UnrealIRCd, and UnrealIRCd would allow the spammers in (fail-safe).

This has now been resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

(*) We did submit spam earlier to DroneBL, all the way back to Oct 2023, but it happend with a delay and detection was not confident enough, false positives causing issues and having to mass-delist IP's and such. Since January 2025 it is different: it is now with high confidence and the DroneBL listing gets added in 1-2 seconds.

[CrazyCat]

I wasn't hit by the spam attak, but thanks Syzop for the reactivity.
No need of mea culpa, anyone can do a typo and it's hard to test and chack when it's for protection.

Thanks again.