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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.)"

4 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!

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

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