Message Board

Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

Is The Hunt Useless?

Author: J.Norwood (28 Apr 08 4:43am)

Hello Everyone

I own a forum and found that once it started getting indexed that the spammers soon found me. Needless to say I now have a hunter attitude when it comes to spammers. I don't wait for them to post their spam or porn. I am proactively looking up the member IPs and banning anyone with a spamming record.

I have been doing alot of reading and found that some Hosts are selling 3 day proxy domains for an extremely cheap price. After reading this it all made sense to me. Spammers WANT to spam us all with throw away accounts. Spam everyone, dump it after 3 days and go get a new account!

So here is my question. If this is the trend... then is all of my hard work looking up IPs and email addresses all for nothing?

Thanks in advance for your response.

J. Norwood

Re: Is The Hunt Useless?

Author: J.Huysmans (15 May 08 4:53am)

A host that sells accounts like that will pretty soon have all its ip addresses listed with project Honeypot. Problem solved. :-)

Re: Is The Hunt Useless?

Author: M.Zraik (26 Jun 08 1:47pm)

Hi J. Norwood,

Although it may seem that the work is futal, it isn't. J. Huysmans is correct not only about HoneyPot, but also many other BL's.

However, it's that feeling of violation that seems to get us riled up and frustrated.

I recommend using your .htaccess file if you have control over it and redirect the morons making a living on spam to places like the fbi.gov website, or my favorite, have the server process a 410 GONE error. And then create a group of randomly generated pages of pure junk email addresses - about 25 pages of 150 randomly generated (Not Filterable) email addresses that are not linked to any of your normal pages, but they exists just for those spam bots to find, all 3750 of them.

Since the bots are just software, they will happily collect your un-filterable junk emails and add them to their database and basically be a huge pain for the spammer to manually remove each one. Eventually, you can become more of a pain than a resource and start costing the lazy spammers time and money, or they can remove you from their list of targets. Not that they will give up immediately, but eventually. So don't just block the IP's with a 403 forbidden, use other redirects and errors to spice up your life, and theirs.

Happy Hunting/Blocking/Redirecting,
M. Zraik

Re: Is The Hunt Useless?

Author: M.Zraik (26 Jun 08 1:51pm)

Part Two:

The real goal here is to protect and reduce the spammers use of your resources. When you block and redirect with .htaccess, the spammers don't even get to your scripts once they are in your file for rewrite.

410 is not expected -- M.Zraik

Re: Is The Hunt Useless?

Author: L.Perplies (29 Sep 08 11:18am)

I have to admit, I'm no expert when it comes to internet.

But I'd suggest using the http:bl that Project Honeypot puts out. You have to qualify to use it by owning a honeypot/quicklinks and maybe an MX entry or two. You have to have some number of "karma" points to use it.

But it does something similar to what you want. It'll lookup an IP address upon accessing your website, and if found to be suspicious it'll give it a blank page. Or somehow you can set it up to display your honeypot or someone elses honeypot (a quicklink, for example).

I sound so clueless about this because I have a WordPress plugin that handles it all for me. All I do is look at the log every once in a while and smile. :)

But look up the http:bl and give it a shot if you qualify.