Message Board

Bugs & Development

Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: J.Cridland (12 Dec 04 2:46pm)

I'd like to show the community at mediauk.com the statistics for www.mediauk.com

Is this currently possible?

Re: Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: M.Prince (12 Dec 04 3:56pm)

We've architected the system to allow you to choose whether trends and statistics will be available to third parties by designating your honey pots either public or private. Our idea is that some users may want to include a link from their site to their honey pot stats pages and we want to provide a mechanism to allow for that.

However, we haven't turned on stats/trends reporting yet. We want to make sure we have enough data to make the stats meaningful before we begin reporting them. I'd guess we'll turn them on in a month or two. When we do we'll report things like what the average time between a harvester first visiting and when the first spam message is received, how many spam servers are, on average, associated with a harvester, etc...

Even though the stats/trends are not available, the list of harvesters that are attacking your site(s) is currently online. However, the way that you get to that page (through a POST instead of a GET) makes it difficult for us to allow 3rd parties to access the page. For a lot of reasons, including this one, we have been thinking about changing this. If we do then 3rd parties will be able to access the details of the harvesters trolling your site(s) if you designate them as "public" when you set them up.

I'll post here if we make that change (which I think we will when we have a chance) and also when we turn on the formal stats reporting.

Thanks for your question and welcome to the Project.

Re: Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: M.Prince (15 Jan 05 6:09pm)

We just completed an update to the statistics pages that now allow you to include a link to your honey pot page's statistics if you've marked them as "public." For example, here is a link to the stats for harvesters caught by the honey pot installed on the Project Honey Pot site:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/bots_and_servers.php?__mode=t_40006

To find the link to your own honey pot stats page, login to your account, visit the Active Spam Harvesters page at:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/bots_and_servers.php

Then select the honey pot you want to display the stats for from the pulldown in the menu on the left. Copy down the URL that you're taken to and it will always take you to the stats for this honey pot.

If you want, you can include a link to this page from your site so your visitors can see the harvesters that are targeting your site. If you don't want people to be able to access this data, you can mark your honey pot data as private by editing the details for the particular honey pot from the Manage Honey Pots page:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/manage_honey_pots.php

If you have more than one honey pot installed, it is not possible to allow third parties to access the cumulative data for all of them on one page.

Re: Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: D.Lerner (11 Feb 05 8:01am)

Re: public statistics vs. private statistics

What are the risks of making my statistics public? Does that reveal any information that could make my domain more susceptible to abuse?

Re: Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: M.Prince (11 Feb 05 11:46am)

I can't think of any way that it would make your site more susceptible to abuse. It may, on the other hand, give people some sense of how much traffic your website receives. That may or may not be a concern to you, but it's the biggest risk I can think of. There may be other potential risks that we haven't been made aware of.

The vast majority of members leave their site stats "public." And, in fact, a large number of folks include links on their pages to allow visitors see the harvesters they've helped to catch. We're working on implementing an RSS feed as well so members can display right on their site what harvesters they've helped to catch.

Re: Can I show my statistics to someone else?

Author: D.Lerner (11 Feb 05 11:02pm)

Thanks for the explanation. :)