Project Honey Pot
Project Honey Pot is a collaborative effort to stop spam. From their website:
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
Many folks don’t know that there are malicious programs that do nothing but traverse the Internet “harvesting” email addresses. Project Honey Pot allows site owners to easily set up a trap to identify these. I highly recommend all site owners to join the effort.
Does it work? Yep! Today I received the following email:
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: 190.19.79.146). The harvester was caught by your honey pot installed at:
You can find information about your newly identified harvester here:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/i_51efbe818834aa71c797e2354418b925
Info on all the harvesters that have been spotted by this honey pot is also available here:
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/t_51319.1dd0a
Don’t forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better today….
Thanks from the entire Project Honey Pot team and, we’re sure if they knew, from the Internet community as a whole.
It is nice to help make the world a little bit better…