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Project Honey Pot Traps Billionth Spam

Posted by timothy on from the spam-sequestration dept.

EastDakota writes "Project Honey Pot today announced that it had trapped its 1 billionth spammer. To celebrate, the team behind the largest community sourced project tracking online fraud and abuse released a full rundown of statistics on the last five years of spam. Findings include: spam drops 21% on Christmas Day and 32% of New Year's Day; the most spam is sent on Mondays, the least on Saturdays; spammers found at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.) in mail received by the Project; and much more."

10 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. In the terribly elegant words of... someone? by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't fix stupid.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
    1. Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone? by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hmm. I'm not sure that destroying something really qualifies as fixing it...

      Dunno, but we'll soon see, there's an experiment with this method currently being tested on our economy.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Re:Spam = spy chatter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    *slow golf clap*

    Gmail strips most of the links.

  3. The summary is wrong by hwyhobo · · Score: 1, Informative

    The article says clearly:

    On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message

    In fact, the title of the article is:

    Our 1 Billionth Spam Message

    --
    End anonymous moderation and posting on /.
  4. Re:People fall for spam? by Again · · Score: 2, Informative

    because if you send a million spam mails you only need a handful of people to actually buy anything, I'm talking a few dozen, to cover your costs.

    And if the spam includes a link to a website which is ad-based the user doesn't even need to hand over his credit card number to make the spam worthwhile.

  5. Re:ok by idontgno · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Spam Club is sending a message. That posting was the /. equivalent of a horse's head in your bed.

    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  6. Re:Spam = spy chatter? by CorporateSuit · · Score: 2, Informative

    I guess there is also some chance that there is some botnet out there set to verify that mail reaches addresses, and it is just running out of control.

    This. It's not just about finding whether the email address is correct, though, it's also testing the junkmail filters -- seeing what words will get a domain on a blacklist and which will still get delivered or bounced at the directory level. I learned this after researching why I got a promising email titled "TEENAGE GIRL HAS SEX WITH BAT!" only to open it up and find a disappointing message like "Gillette rosemary is talking sweet sound to hair bounces great. Sounded of?"

    --
    I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
  7. Re:ok by Dan+Ost · · Score: 3, Informative

    If my understanding is correct, project honey pot puts bogus emails in webpages and any mail sent to those email addresses are, pretty much by definition, spam.

    If that's true, then that would indicate that your machine is sending email to honey pot addresses.

    --

    *sigh* back to work...
  8. Re:Spam = spy chatter? by hvm2hvm · · Score: 2, Informative

    in short... yes

    --
    ics
  9. Re:no ipV6 by Straterra · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not really. Every end user is supposed to get a /64. You could just block their /64 and accomplish pretty much the same thing.