Message Board

Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

do spammers avoid domains with honey pots?

Author: A.Holte (22 Mar 13 12:18pm)

Is it possible that comment spammers will avoid domain names with honey pots on them?

I seem to have experienced a major slow down of comment spam attempts after sending comment spammers to the honey pot installed on my site.

Re: do spammers avoid domains with honey pots?

Author: H.User1325 (22 Mar 13 6:30pm)

I wish it were so! However, I have honeypots on every domain I control, with links scattered on each page of websites and my forum. They have been there for "years" but that didn't stop a resent barrage that ran for over 3 weeks and peaked at several hundred comment spam/day.

That attack didn't slowdown until I implemented http:BL blocking access to any IP with a threat score over 30. Sense I have raised the threshold to 40 and am getting about 10 comments/day blocking 40-80 a day.

I will be interested in the official response to your two post suggesting that you direct a visitor to a honey pot when you suspect they are a spammers. That doesn't agree with the way I read the TOSU:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/terms_of_service_use.php Section I, paragraph 2.

Re: do spammers avoid domains with honey pots?

Author: A.Holte (23 Mar 13 4:01am)

Thanks. I now see the part of the website about getting spammers to pass you over so I guess it's possible.

I didn't read that section that way. I'd only send obviously non-human visitors to the honey pot and I'm not encouraging them to do anything with the information on that page. I certainly don't want to violate the terms though so I'm asking.

Re: do spammers avoid domains with honey pots?

Author: D.Zerkle (5 Apr 13 1:36pm)

Some do.

For instance, the xrumer comment spam software can use a blacklist of honeypot sites in a file called xblack.txt, and there are services that explicitly build such files containing lists of contributors to stopforumspam.com. If they bother with that, I'm sure they can put other honeypots in there.

See https://www.google.com/search?q=xblack.txt for some examples.