Spam Links Blog

Do Spiders Like Honey?

Web poison is a well known idea. You create a load of junk addresses, put them on a web page, and a spambot sucks them up. The addresses are junk, and the pages might loop indefinitely, both of which slightly slow the spammer.

Taking that concept to the next level, we have Spambot Traps, which use honeytokens to track the harvester through to the spam that later arrives at the scraped address. A honeytoken is a known string, seeded in order to trap the possessor of the token, when it is used. Used here, the token is embedded into the scraped address, and either directly encodes the scraper's details, or contains a unique code that can be used to pull those details out of a database. In either case, the spam arrives, and you know who scraped the address, when.

Add that to the arsenal of anti-spam honeypots, and we're starting to see some powerful tools to make it harder for the spammer to hide his activity.