Stopping Spambots: A Spambot Trap

Neil Gunton writes "Having been hit by a load of spambots on my community site, I decided to write a Spambot Trap which uses Linux, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, ipchains and Embperl to quickly block spambots that fall into the trap. "

/.ed

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you should've written some code to handle an overload from slashdot too!

Slashbot

[Ctrl-Z]

"I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this bandwidth is too narrow to transmit."

Re:/.ed

[HiQ]

The dude fell in his own trap. :-D

Hammered already....

[cswiii]

From the website:
The Problem: Spambots Ate My Website

s/Spambots/Slashdot/

The WOrld is now safe.

[ksplatter]

Thanks to: Spam Bots!!! More than meets the Eye :)

Another way to stop spambots

[PanBanger]

Have your page linked on slashdot! Page gets slashdotted, problem solved.

Re:Block? Are you kidding?

[BlueUnderwear]

- for every random (non-existent) domain that you generate, a root DNS server will be queried when an email is sent to this address, which increases the load on the root servers, which is generally a bad thing.

Why is this a bad thing? They are owned by Verisign.

How about instead, returning pages with the email address abuse@domain-that-spambot-is-coming-from all over them...

This is also a good idea. In fact, I have a script which does a traceroute to the IP of the bot, and then looks up the admin contact using whois for the last couple of hops, and returns these. Oh, and for additional fun, throw in a couple of addresses of especially loved "friends"...

Re:Elements of good design I'd missed

[dattaway]

but...but...a blind AND deaf internet user couldn't read your webpage.

I'm sure you don't want THAT kind of lawsuit.

Re:Block? Are you kidding?

[blibbleblobble]

Especially loved "friends"...

Like [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail] for example?

Note to self

[underclocked]

Before announcing new useful project to Slashdot community, create Freshmeat/Sourceforge page first there by eliminating the need for my host to shut me down for execssive bandwidth.

Thank you all very much

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that I've read all your countermeasures, I have created the ultimate Spam Bot to get by these traps. ;]