Message Board

Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

Spam received on public email but not harvested?

Author: A.Shinn (9 Oct 08 12:26pm)

I am trying to figure out if what I just saw means that the spam bot only found my email address. But not the special harvester page.

I received a spam for an email address that is not published anywhere except one page on my website. The email is blatant spam and appears to be caught by a spambot roving my pages for email addresses.

So I went and checked the logs of my email server to get the IP address of the server that sent the email to me. I wanted to verify if it was in the harvester database. TO my surprise it is not.

The IP in question is 64.18.7.10 and the spam came from:

Jim Meyer
meyer.jim@etriguecorp.com

So is it possible the harvester just didn't navigate to the honeypot page?

Re: Spam received on public email but not harvested?

Author: M.Prince (9 Oct 08 2:10pm)

Definitely possible it didn't navigate to the honey pot page. Or that, if it dd navigate there, for some reason it didn't pick up a trap address. Or, if it did pick up a trap address, for some reason the spammer hasn't sent messages to it yet. There's a massive dispersion in the behavior of spammers. There are actually academics getting their Ph.D.s looking at our data and trying to map the behaviors of "criminal social networks." I don't pretend to understand, but keep checking back and we'll see if that IP gets listed. Usually, over time, indications are we see a pretty complete set of the spam harvesters running around.