Internic hosage (fwd)

Sun Mar 22 16:09:20 UTC 1998

Dean Robb writes:

> The misuse aspect has come about because spammers (primarily) have bots
> that will harvest all the addresses in WhoIs and send them their drivel.  

Contact handles are predictable.  All you need to do in a bot is try all
the permutations of 2 or 3 letters, with or without -ORG at the end, and
increment numbers until nothing is found.  That will get you perhaps 99%
of the handles.

Handles should instead be generated in an unpredictable way, such as MD5.

-- 
Phil Howard | stop3it8 at s9p1a4m9.net suck7it4 at dumb4ads.com blow2me7 at spammer7.com
  phil      | blow7me9 at dumbads1.com eat0this at s4p2a4m7.com crash760 at dumbads9.org
    at      | no1spam5 at no34ads2.edu end2it40 at s3p5a8m6.edu eat4this at noplace7.org
  milepost  | suck9it9 at no5where.com stop8it5 at spammer1.org w7x7y8z3 at s2p8a7m3.com
    dot     | blow8me3 at noplace5.org no46ads3 at no99ads7.org suck0it3 at no23ads5.edu
  com       | no46ads7 at no9place.net w9x2y9z5 at anywhere.com eat1this at noplace7.org