Spammers are one of the most annoying natural enemies of the blogging community. They waste the time of site administrators who must install anti-spam systems and dig through suspicious comments to pick out real ones. They waste the time of users who are forced to jump through hoops like site registration and CAPCHAs.
One way to help fight spam is to participate in Project Honeypot. If you run a website, they will give you a script to add somewhere. Then, you add links to the script that robots will follow, but not people. This allows the project to catalogue the IP addresses of robots, as well as track the general spam problem globally. People who run websites but don’t control the hosting (for instance, people with blogs on Blogger.com or WordPress.com) can add ‘QuickLinks’ which serve a similar function.
People running WordPress blogs can also use the http:BL WordPress Plugin to take advantage of Project Honeypot’s data and block spammers and harvesters of email addresses.
Setting up a honeypot only takes a couple of minutes, and gives the satisfaction of knowing you are helping to make the internet a slightly more civil place. In addition to running a honeypot and using the http:BL plugin, this site has a wiki protected with Bad Behaviour, a blog protected with Akismet, and spam defences built into .htaccess.
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Milan — Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here’s something to be happy about — today a honey pot you installed successfully identified a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 151.59.232.114). The harvester was caught by your honey pot installed at:
http://www.sindark.com
You can find information about your newly identified harvester here:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ip_151.59.232.114
Info on all the harvesters that have been spotted by your honey pots is also available here:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/list_of_ips.php?t=h&m=us r_hp.h.60455
Don’t forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better today. You can refer them to Project Honey Pot directly from our website:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/refer_a_friend.php
Caught another one:
Just doing my part, to fight the scourge of spam.
On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message was an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam sent to an email address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators like you in more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.
To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn more about spam and the spammers who send it. As a small token of thanks for your help, we wanted to share some of our more interesting preliminary findings. Click the following link for the Full Report:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message _stats.php
Highlights include:
- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the
quietest
- 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the
quietest
- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
378% since Project Honey Pot started
- Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a
phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is
rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
- Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some
of the worst
- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first
harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message,
but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago
- Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect
to receive more than 850 spam messages
- Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year’s Day
- And much more…..
We have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so don’t hesitate to share anything you find interesting. In the end, we couldn’t have gathered this data without you
The History of the Honey Trap
Five lessons for would-be James Bonds and Bond girls — and the men and women who would resist them.
BY PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY | MARCH 12, 2010
MI5 is worried about sex. In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”
This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use the amorous arts to obtain secret information.
The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”
Those who aim to perfect the art of the honey trap in the future, as well as those who seek to insulate themselves, would do well to learn from honey trap history. Of course, there are far too many stories — too many dramas, too many rumpled bedsheets, rattled spouses, purloined letters, and ruined lives — to do that history justice here. Yet one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.