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.
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=usr_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.
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: 115.49.98.85). 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_115.49.98.85
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=usr_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
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.
CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.
Join CloudFlare today and be part of the community that is creating a better web.
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: 59.60.124.222). 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_59.60.124.222
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=usr_hp.h.60455
Don’t forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better
today.
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: 89.123.29.44). 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_89.123.29.44
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=usr_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
On Thursday, the newspaper sent a website link to the account operator, who uses an encrypted Hushmail email account. Other than the Citizen, only Vikileaks30 had access to the website.
Fifteen minutes after the link was sent, Vikileaks30 bit, clicked and viewed the page, enabling Citizen reporters to determine the IP — essentially an identification tag assigned to each web-wired device — came from inside Parliament.
The newspaper also discovered the IP address is attached to a House employee who edits Wikipedia articles “often giving them what appears to be a pro-NDP bias,” and comments on a Paul Simon fan page.
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: 209.85.224.80). 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_209.85.224.80
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=usr_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
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: 115.199.129.14). 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_115.199.129.14
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=usr_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
Thanks from the entire Project Honey Pot team and, we’re sure if they knew,
from the Internet community as a whole.
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: 84.120.170.93). 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_84.120.170.93
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=usr_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
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: 92.82.229.183). 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_92.82.229.183
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=usr_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
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: 2.122.246.221). 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_2.122.246.221
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=usr_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
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: 81.129.78.194). 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_81.129.78.194
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=usr_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
You’ve chosen to receive this message every time one of your honey pots
or donated MXs helps identify a new harvester. We don’t blame you, we’re
constantly checking in to see what we’ve caught. However, if you’re
sick of these messages, you can turn them off by visiting your settings
page:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/preferences.php
Thanks from the entire Project Honey Pot team and, we’re sure if they knew,
from the Internet community as a whole.