Project Honeypot

The concept of a honeypot is not a new one. The idea is to generate a system that will get bad guys to go after something that looks legit, but it is really a trap to either catch them or tie up their resources.

In the spam world, such a system is one that generates fake e-mail addresses that either are designed to fill up the spammers' databases with junk (this can technically generate real e-mail addresses accidentally as well), and also waste their resources by staying on pages full of e-mail addresses and all links lead to more pages with more fake addresses.
The other method in the spam world is to track who is harvesting your e-mail, when, where, and how.

The latter is more the case at hand with Project Honeypot.

They have a system (all free) which allows you to sign up and then have fake e-mails automatically generated for your site that allow tracking of spammers that hit the site.
They even have a MovableType plug-in so that one of the most popular blogging tools used on the web (including what Spamblogging here is run on) can be made to easily interface with their system.

All of that said, I haven't signed-up with them or used their service yet. I will try to get it to it later this week and report what I can about it, but in the meantime please post up if you use it and can tell us anything about it.

Posted by Eric at November 29, 2004 10:41 AM | TrackBack