Honeypot For Identifying Email-Harvesters

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.)"

Comments

I say...

[JoeLinux]

That there should be email addresses that the big companies "float" out onto spamming lists. When a mass email comes back with these email addresses, it's a flag that its spam, and block the whole message from going into the system. Of course, security on what those email addresses are would have to be pretty tight...

Re:I say...

[Eyston]

This is exactly what a lot of them do.

I think Earthlinks Spam Blocker is using that idea.

-Eyston

Spammers are pretty simple (for now)

[brejc8]

I am plesently suprised that my anti-spam encoded email address still has not been spammed. And even a recent spam study found that only normal email addresses got spam.
It wouldnt take much to find and decode most of the simple spam-protected email addresses. And I dont think it would take long for the spammers to detect a system such as this and bypass it, but I dont think they will bother at the current climate.
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.

Re: Spammers are pretty simple (for now)

[mistered]

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

I do. I use myid-nospam@my_domain.org for news groups, dubious web site forms, etc. In several years, I've received exactly one spam at that account. It looks like many of the harvesters remove any address with "spam" in it, because they think it's likely fake (or at least harvester-proofed).

By far most of my spam comes to my old eBay account. Luckily that was myid-ebay@my_domain.org, which will soon be removed in favour of a slightly different permutation.

A new RBL?

[astrashe]

I wonder if maybe someone could create a network of honeypots, and feed the data into a database that could be accessed in real time by web servers, to deny access.

It would probably impose too much of a performance hit for a popular site, but maybe for smaller stuff -- your bio page, or whatever -- it would be appropriate.

So you found the harvester...

[anubi]

Its been my experience that even though you find out which IP the harvesting spider operated from, they only sell their harvested stuff to mass marketers, which proceed through several layers of people before ending up in the hands of those doing the mass mailings.

These guys come like a thief in the night. They load your page like any other search engine spider. Its like knowing the face of the guy who went through your neighborhood, trying every door knob in the guise of distributing an advertising flyer, then later he disclosed to other thieves, unknown to you, whose at home during the day and who is not.

Yes, its helpful in building a case, like knowing who is going through a neighborhood trying all the doors, but catching the actual guy in the act is not as easy.

Some of this spam is really getting nasty. Just two days ago, I received this spam in my box purporting to be from the fraud department of Best Buy regarding CD players some guy in New York is trying to buy with my credit card. It seemed a really professional email, except they didn't know my name, and apparently had to get my email addy from a national credit bureau agency. When the links did not point as shown, I really became leery. The whole thing was apparently a ruse to get me to log into their site and disclose all sorts of personal information, playing on my fear that if I did not do so, the fraudulent transaction would complete.

Watch out, guys. There's a lot of deception going on out there.

Any tools and techniques we make to help us find out who these little rascals are is really welcome. Being some students just got nailed for their life savings for just their involvement in sharing a few songs, I trust this same environment can be used for those involved in internet scams which often cost not just a few record sales, but often substantial, I mean really substantial, grief for the victim.

fighting spam

[daserver]

The only email address I have on my site is blockme@mydomain and if anyone sends an email to that one they get blacklisted. Easy but effective.

Re:But what can you do about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, just put up a WebPoison page and spoil their ill gotten gains by fooling the harvesters into grabbing lots of apparently valid (tho very fake) email addresses. If enough of their customers get pissed for being sold bad email lists, eventually the problem will be lessened. http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/ "So the basic idea behind Wpoison is to trap unwary and badly engineered address harvesting web crawlers, and to fool them into adding enormous quantities of completely bogus e-mail addresses to the E-mail address data bases of the spammers, thus polluting those data bases so badly that they become essentially useless, thereby putting the spammers who are using them out of business, or at least shutting them down for a time and causing them some major headaches while they try to clean up the messes in their now-heavily-polluted e-mail address data bases." "...if one of these spammer address harvesting web crawlers is left to try to digest your entire web site, say, overnight, then within a few hours (and certainly by morning) its data base of e-mail addresses will have been well and throughly polluted by millions of utterly bogus e-mail addresses..."

Better PHP code

[Sanity]

Here is some PHP code that will do something similar - it just encodes the IP address, but it does so much more efficiently - resulting in email addresses as short as "fwAAAQ@blah.com". The fwAAAQ can then be decoded using base64_decode to get back to the original IP address.

$remaddr = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$ips = explode(".", $remaddr);
$bst = "";
foreach($ips as $b) {
$bst = $bst . chr(intval($b));
}
$out = str_replace("=", "", base64_encode($bst));

echo("<a href=\"mailto:$out@blah.com\">email me!</a>");