Hiding spamtraps in plain sight
The proper way to collect spam you want to use for going after the bad guys, is to hide them in plain sight, and never publicize them.
So I’ve been working on a theory of how it could be done - by regular dudes.
Say you have a website, and you want to hide a spamtrap on that domain. Put a link on your front page. Hide it under an image nobody would think to click on. Such as a plain counter or something else silly. Put a nofollow on the link. And outlaw the site for search engine spiders on the page itself, just in case there are links to that page from somewhere else (who knows, right?). The point with the nofollow, is that you’ll be doing something Google frowns on.
You’ll use invisible text to stash a mailto and the e-mail address. Just the way the harvesting bots like’em. I doubt they’d be able to differentiate between visible or invisible text, eh?
This is just a theory. Feel free to jump in and tell me why it’s a stupid theory.
I think, you could be right. I just wrote a quick and dirty regex to get email addresses from your start web page:
gentoo / # wget -q -O- http://spamhuntress.com|grep -i “\@”|sed -n “s:^.*[\t >\:]\([a-z0-9\.+-_]\{1,255\}@[a-z0-9\.+-_]\{1,255\}\.[a-z]\{2,4\}\)[\t
Ouch! My regex is not correctly posted. Don’t know why. Probably your blog does not like it?
Yeah, WP is like that. Mangles code every chance it gets. You’d need to put it in a text file and link to the text file.
Is the regex important to you? If so, then I put it on a web page or I can send it to you. Else I leave it the way it is.
This technique definitely works. We get tons of spam sent to spamtraps concealed just this way — though the amount seems to be related to traffic, as if the harvester bots only target sites they deem worth the effort of finding addresses.
Are you familiar with Project Honeypot? It works on roughly the same theory, but with a unique address generated for each page read so that a given target address can be linked to a particular harvesting bot. They leave the method of concealing the link up to the participating webmaster, but they have a number of suggestions
[...] A number of our spamtrap addresses are “seeded” by hiding them on websites. Put it somewhere that no human visitor will notice, ’cause the harvesting bots will see it anyway. There’s a whole set scattered across this domain, for instance, and even the spamtraps hidden in different areas of this site attract different types of spammers. [...]
Ironically, Search Engines DO follow the nofollow - perhaps it is a statistical error or defective programming - but using the LINK: operator in all the major SEs (GYM) back links were being attributed to sites that used the nofollow on the link…..
of couse one could still use robots.txt and disalllow or keep changing the URL name of that page often enough to insure that it could never be linked to.
another interesting experiment is to find out if any bots read IMAGES - YES IMAGES …by putting a black and white arial Gif image of an Email address…
Some blogs are using SUCH complex and hard to read image verification - that one suspects they are aware of bot-reading-image technology :LOL
I’ve just published a new website (about a week old) and I’ve been forced to remove the email contact off the site already because of the amount of spam I have been bombarded with. These spamming grubs are amazing
This WEB POISON stuff is just another stupid idea promote by low life people. Noboby need that kind of crab.
If you think, you will bother spammer harvesting robot, think again. They don’t care, and BTW, they will reject any fake domain. If you put a valid domain, with fake prefixe, you just corrupted this email address, if an harvesting robots add this address to his database. Nobody will be able to use this address as his own address when it’s use by spammers.
Finally, if you but some valid email, the email, will just continue to received lots of spam message.
BTW, their enough fake email in spammers databese to feed all the spam trap in the market.
Try to be more inovative to fight spam.
See the web poison original site:
http://www.webpoison.org/
Gilles has been sleeping in class. He signed my blog with one of those “tagged by site he commented on” addresses.
Usually, when I have to let an email address on a site, I try to let a personnalize address on this site, so, if I received any spam at this address, I know who are connect to the spammer gang. As the post topic, it’s a different matter. The site owner hide some address to feed the spammers database. It’s different.
I’ve been trying this since at least February, maybe earlier…… 100-110MB average data transfer a month on my site, and not a single message in the mailbox I set up for both “mailharvester.boobytrap@admin.jdaltpol.co.uk” (hidden on the entrance to my personal website’s CONTACT page) & “spambot.trap@jdaltpol.co.uk” (hidden in the membership listings for the messageboard on my MONTY PYTHON fansite).
Nice solution
anton.tesla@cfe.gob.mx