Using tarpits to trap spammers

TAR TANGLE

Article from Issue 76/2007
Author(s):

A tarpit slows down spam by reducing the effectiveness of the spammer’s weapons.

Many email addresses appear on the web, and spammers employ harvester applications to collect those addresses for future mailings. Some victims fight back with a tool called a tarpit. A tarpit is an automatically-generated website that baits a harvester with a complex tangle of meaningless URLs. The longer you can pull the wool over the harvester’s eyes, the longer the list of tarpitted addresses will become. Under ideal circumstances, the harvester would end up with a list full of tarpitted links. To allow this to happen, the bait site must publish more links to itself than an average website. I ran a mini spider I developed myself against 23,000 pages and determined that each page had an average of 6.4 new links. The typical tarpit may publish 20 new links per page - three times the average value. Every round adds to the number of tarpitted links in the harvester’s list of sites.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Blocking Spam Intro

    Spammers charge real money for their dubious services, and hundreds of advertisers are willing to pay. We’ll show you some innovative techniques for controlling and containing spam, including strategies for slowing down spam bots, keeping spammers from getting your address, and separating spam from legitimate email.

  • Address Protection

    Sometimes the best way to keep spam out of your mailbox is to keep the spammers from getting your address.

  • Spam Test

    Spam filters can help smooth the waves in your inbox, as long as they are reliable and don’t have too many side effects. We’ll show you what we found when we tested five antispam appliances and two service providers.

  • KnujOn

    Although spam filtering and blocking is helpful for the end user, it doesn't stop the production of spam. KnujOn strikes spam at the source.

  • Greylisting with Postgrey

    Vendors continue to develop new defenses against spam, one of the Internet’s most notorious pests. In this article, we integrate Postgrey with the Postfix mail server for a greylisting and whitelisting solution.

comments powered by Disqus