Message Board

Installing Honey Pots

Testing my script

Author: N.Jackson2 (14 Feb 05 6:39am)

Hi, great project, great idea. As an original 'white-hat' from TINLC days (oh what times we had, whacking spammers accounts and getting them all moved to China), this is a wonderful bit of creative thinking. Let's hope it works.

I don't get a great deal of of traffic, but the site has been up since about 2002, and the domain in existence since 1993, and I know it's on at least one of the "4-billion addresses on CD" that were circulating in the past. I know I get some spam-bots, for sure - let's hope we catch one.

Anyway, I installed my ASP script ok, activated it ok, and stuck a hidden link into my templates so that it is available (invisibly) on every page on my site.

I dunno if I did something naughty, but I went and had a look at the script 'in-situ' in my browser, just to see what the spambot would see. I got a page of 'Terms and Conditions' as I expected, but there was no email address link at the bottom, above the logo, as I had seen on the example page.

Is this correct? If so, how does the spambot find an email addy to send to, and complete the circle? Or was it just blocked for me, because the client-IP address would've been the same as my registered domain?

Just curious, and want to know that it's really working.

Thanks again for a super-smart idea.

Re: Testing my script

Author: M.Prince (14 Feb 05 1:29pm)

Great to have you on board, and thanks for the kudos.

The email address is hidden from most human visitors, but if you view the source you can usually see it near the bottom of the script. Sounds like you did that and it still wasn't there. That's normal behavior too....

We don't distribute an email address under a number of potential events. One is, as you speculated, if the IP address accessing the script is the same as the IP address where the script is hosted. Another is if the script registers your IP in a private range (192.168.*.*, 10.*.*.*, 172.16.*.* - 172.31.*.*). There are serveral other times we choose not to hand out an address to a properly installed script as well.

We put these measures in place for a number of reasons, not the least of which is our attempt to make it more difficult for someone who is trying to purposefully harvest our addresses from a honey pot they have installed themselves.

The general rule is: if the terms and conditions appear, everything is working just fine!

Thanks for the feedback and the kudos!

Re: Testing my script

Author: N.Jackson2 (15 Feb 05 9:08am)

Lovely job - it is as I deduced then. Cool.... good to know it's all working as planned.

Now all I've got to do is find out where the tracker bit is, to see how many harvesters I've found (or not)! :o)

Let me at 'em.... dang Spammers... worse than thieves, all of 'em. LOL.