Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Honeypot For Identifying Email-Harvesters

Posted by timothy on from the off-with-their-heads dept.

Cheese Man writes "Mark Pilgrim describes a simple way to identify email-harvesters: "In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address ... This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots." There's even a simple one-line example done with PHP. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the links.)"

9 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Honeypot vs honey hole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Last line of the article:

    title edit (6/19, 6:47am): Honeypot not "honey hole." Thanks, Cory.

    What's the difference between the two? Computer geeks have experience with honeypots!

    1. Re:Honeypot vs honey hole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      A honey hole is a pit in the ground that farmers in Certain Asian countries fill with animal and human manure. They allow it to compost a bit and use it on the crops. If you ever were in Korea in the '70s or '80s and took a shortcut across a field at night, you risked falling into one of these pungent pits of fun.

      Trust me, the MP's and the medics will NOT pull you out if it was not a life threatening incident!

      That's how I got my nick...

      Shitbird

  2. Re: wpoison by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny


    > Try wpoision, it's a CGI script to generate a random set of email address, infinitely deep. Very fun.

    I'm trying to invent an e-mail address that explodes if anyone tries to use it.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  3. Re: Spammers are pretty simple (for now) by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny


    > I am plesently suprised that my anti-spam encoded email address still has not been spammed. [...] It wouldnt take much to find and decode most of the simple spam-protected email addresses. [...] But pretty soon I suspect we will get much cleverer email collecting tools and the problem is going to get to the scale of the virus/anti-virus stage.

    Then we'll start putting "nospam" in our real addresses!

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  4. Re:But what can you do about it? by gilesjuk · · Score: 1, Funny

    True, however no website has a guarantee that you have to serve them with any data or pages.

  5. Re:Nothing new by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1, Funny

    Whene I register for stuff online, I often use email addresses like sales@127.0.0.1

  6. Payback pages by NewtonsLaw · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why bother with honeypots when a Payback Page is far more satisfying :-)

  7. Use it against them. by capt.Hij · · Score: 2, Funny

    You could bite back. Instead of trying to track them how about including the email address of the postmaster at the machine calling the page. That way when a harvester at j3rk.ugh.com calls your page it sees an address postmaster@j3rk.ugh.com. The harvester then sells his own address to the spammers. Then sit back and hope that the harvester decides to try to grow his organ enough that he doesn't need to do this stuff....

  8. Re:So you found the harvester... by the-build-chicken · · Score: 2, Funny

    he he he...I wonder if anyone lives at that Staten Island address....or funnier yet...if the guy living at 40 Winham St got the email....[leaning out window]..."Hey...Fred...did you take my F$%#in credit card!"...lmao...news @ 4...brawl errupts in Winham St Staten Island.