Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Catching the real offenders?

Author: L.Lawton (27 Apr 07 7:13pm)

Hi,

Genuine newbie - just discovered honeypot. Thinking of getting into it, but just wondering..... I got onto this through a comment on another forum. Another person posted this comment in reply, and I'd be interested if someone could provide a response:

"You know, I have to wonder about how they are going to go about doing this.

A for-instance.

Joe Spammer in Mainland China develops a zombie that he installs by enticing users to view a video of Britney Spears shaving her head. He infects thousands of Windoze computers. Joe Spammer's zombie, running on the infected computers, collects a bunch of e-mail addresses by web harvesting through the zombie (including some Honey Pot addresses), and then using the harvested e-mail addresses, the zombie starts sending out millions of spam e-mails.

Joe Innocentuser (a rabid Britney fan), visits the site, computer infected, and his computer's zombie starts harvesting addresses, and sending out thousands of spam e-mails a day from his infected computer.

Who is the defendant here?

Joe Innocentuser's computer is the only one that Project Honeypot knows about."

Sounds a fair point to me. Can anyone comment? TIA

Lance

Re: Catching the real offenders?

Author: J.Yard2 (29 Apr 07 3:26pm)

With http:BL coming on the scene doesn't really matter if the 'real offenders' are caught or not. They will have a much higher threshold to harvest addresses because their zombies will have much shorter useful life. Which means they will have to spend more effort to increase the rate of acquiring new zombies.

As for the innocent Joe who as been zombie-fied. If enough web sites use http:BL to block them, maybe they’ll take back control of their machine so they can use it.