Spam Links Blog

Lycos to DDoS

Joining a motley crew of anti-spammers who use questionnable tactics, are Lycos Europe, with their offering Make Love not Spam. Other than pointing out that their idea of carrying out Denial of Service attacks on spammers isn't a particularly new idea - it's just that the marketing department of Lycos are rather more visible than your average joe - there isn't a lot to add to what Aunty Spam has to say about the idea.

In case you didn't get the subtle hints, Lycos are on to a loser.

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.

DNSBL to block spambots

A new DNSBL, the Realtime Spider List adds to the growing list of "behaviour driven" DNSBLs that do more than list spam sources.

It isn't live yet, but it promises to be another tool on the belt of the webmaster who doesn't want spambots crawling over his servers.

CSS to hide from spambots

This resource details how to hide an email address from spambots, which is nothing unusual - except that they do it using CSS:

Hiding email address from spambots

Another step forward in the arms race. Would anybody care to make that into a mailto link?

Focus on Securing Systems

Focus on Securing Systems; to make sure that these pages are as accessible as possible, links to references to vulnerability databases have been added where they could be found, links have all been placed into tables with clear link descriptions, and a new page about Directory Harvest Attacks has been published.