Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

20 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Spam = spy chatter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is spam even really spam anymore?

    Every now and then I take a look at my gmail spam folder, and none of the messages contain links or even coherent sentences.

    Nothing being sold, nothing being said... What's the point?

    1. Re:Spam = spy chatter? by maxume · · Score: 5, Funny

      My favorite theory is that spammers are making money by selling spamming services to suckers, not by actually selling a product in the spam.

      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.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    2. Re:Spam = spy chatter? by sentientbeing · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wow cool link. Thanks for that.

      --

      ------
      beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
  2. ok by nomadic · · Score: 4, Funny

    1 billionth spammer

    So approximately one out of every 7 people on earth is a spammer?

    1. Re:ok by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 5, Funny

      And thats only the ones they've caught.

      In fact, almost everyone on the net is a spammer. It's kind of a secret club, where you have to pass a secret trial, to gain your secret right of entry. It's so secret, I shouldn't even be divulging this secret information. If the secret spammers found out, I could get

    2. Re:ok by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Funny

      Nice of them to hit the Submit button for you though, though it does seem to defeat the purpose of killing you for trying to send it.

    3. 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.
    4. Re:ok by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Did you check if your mail server is actually an open relay?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    5. 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...
  3. 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: 5, Funny

      Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone? by dissy · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

      Ah yes, the original 'point and click' interface for remotely managing stupid.

      And it is illegal now you say? My apologies but from the place I hide to avoid stupid, we don't get many updates on all these new fangled laws.

    3. Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes you can. Smith&Wesson released their first debugging tool for it over a century ago. The application remains illegal for some odd reason I don't really understand.

      Ah yes, the original 'point and click' interface for remotely managing stupid.

      And it is illegal now you say? My apologies but from the place I hide to avoid stupid, we don't get many updates on all these new fangled laws.

      It probably violates Amazon's one-click patent.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    4. Re:In the terribly elegant words of... someone? by cybiko123 · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's not for debugging, it's for troubleshooting.

    5. 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.
  4. Re:Thanks for the info on misspelling Viagra by Publikwerks · · Score: 3, Funny

    Jesus, even spamers have better hours than me

  5. Cost-benefit by delirium+of+disorder · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you total up all the productivity lost to fighting spam and time wasted getting spam, it's probably cheaper to just put the spammers out of business by giving every male on earth free Viagra.

    --
    ------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
  6. no ipV6 by mabu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The most effective way of stopping spam thus far is using IP blacklisting. It should be noted if the net moves to ipV6, that will be the end of blacklist effectiveness for some time.

  7. Re:956 ways? by daveime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pare, considering you've been in the "editing" stage since February 2007, perhaps it's time to update your sig to "I've grown tired of making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC" ?

  8. I wonder by tool462 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wonder how many of those Viagra spelling variations are valid Perl code...