Spammer web harvesting tool countermeasures

Fri Oct 31 04:51:20 UTC 1997

This would be even more incredibly cool if you could track which hosts
were fed which fake addresses so you could see which hosts were really
doing the spam crawling.

For example:

When a host like crawler.spammer.com goes to the wpoison page, feed it a
unique email address at yourdomain.  Of course this would require that you
tie the wpoison script up to your mailer.

Re: polluting the legitimate search engines as well as the bad:

webcrawler.com keeps an (almost) up-to-date list of good webcrawlers (as
well as some bad ones).
(http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html) This list
is only 3 or 4 months out of date, so search engines like Microsoft's
yukon would probably not be in the list.  You could use this to exclude
which engines get the wpoison page or not.  Of course this gets back to
the topic of "whitelisting" the internet because of the spammers.

Oh well, I'll shut up now :-)

> ----------
> From: 	Jon Stevens[SMTP:jon at clearink.com]
> Sent: 	Thursday, October 30, 1997 9:58 PM
> To: 	Jay R. Ashworth; nanog at merit.edu; Brian L. Brush
> Subject: 	Re: Spammer web harvesting tool countermeasures
> 
> "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> said the following at 
> 10/30/97 5:33 PM:
> 
> >        This is really neat; I first found it on MacInTouch:
> >
> >http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
> 
> BTW, the WebStar version is at:
> 
> <http://www.clearink.com/fun_stuff/plugins/>
> 
> I just added a cool feature that makes it possible to easily add the 
> spammers to the top of the page...or even better...add a "special"
> unique 
> email address such as wpoison-spam at yourdomain.com. Then you can filter
> 
> all the email that comes through that address and add that to your
> spam 
> databases.  ;-)
> 
> fun fun fun...
> 
> -jon
> 
> Jon (no h) S. Stevens
> Web Engineer
> j at clearink.com
> Clear Ink and The Internet Weather Report
> <http://www.clearink.com/> | <http://www.internetweather.com/>
> 