Project Honey Pot - an interesting spam fighting technique
Week 21, 2007
Introduction
A honeypot can be loosely defined as a device that is meant to trick someone (or somewhat) to use it and thereby trick that person to perform a specific action with the honeypot instead of the real thing. Honeypots of different kinds are widely used as a security device in computer security.
Project Honey Pot - designed to combat spam using a honeypot technique
| Help stop spammers before they even get your address |
This is the information that first meet you when you access the web site belonging to Project Honey Pot, and indeed this is what this project is designed to do: Using the participant's resources (in this case web sites) to help combat the ever-increasing spam problem.
Project Honey Pot is set up to use web sites all over the world as a tool to identify and ultimately stop spammers. By inserting a special link on any web page, harvesters of email addresses and other robots with potentially malicious intent will be identified and reported to Project Honey Pot. Although the honeypot system was originally set up to be used for those who had their own web server, a new feature has recently been available. The so-called "QuickLinks" enable using the honeypot technology on any web pages that any user can edit (e.g. your own personal blog).
How does it function?
The technique used by the Project Honey Pot is that a special link with an email address is inserted in the web page. When this address is harvested and starts receiving (spam) emails, the honeypot can see whene it was harvested as well as the IP address used for harvesting. This then forms the basis for building lists of spammers and reporting to relevant legal authorities and hopefully prosecution of the spammers. 27 April this year Project Honey Pot filed a huge anti-spam lawsuit, seking more than one billion US dollars in statutory damages on behalf of its members. A copy of the complaint is available here (PDF file, opens separate browser window).
New additions to the project
From Project Honey Pot's web site lots of interesting information is available; e.g. which countries that are most involved in spamming, known IP addresses used etc. etc.
Recently new functionality has been added to Project Honey Pot; e.g.:
- A system to monitor and catch "comment spammers"; i.e.those who leave links on forums and blogs with the intent to incease certain (advertising) web sites' rating on search engines.
- A system to block known malicious robots and harvesters from accessing the web sites of active membres of the Honey Pot Project.
- A monitoring system to check that the IP addresses that belong to the members are not used for malicious behaviour.
More information
More information about Project Honey Pot and how to sign up for using this technique to combat spammers, is available on the project's web site (opens a separate browser window).