Son of Spam
I once made the mistake of putting my email address in a mailto: link on my website. Oh, bad mistake. And even though I now have it in an image with a munged addy in the alt tag my address is out there.
I kept the address, but only to gather spammers' addresses, which I put in mailto: links on my homepage, just with nothing between the a tags so they don't show. Let the spambots pick them up.
These scum are such a threat to everything we do that I want to take it a step further. Don't say, "Why don't you just get a filter?" You don't put a band-aid over a gushing wound. I say use their own tools against them. I need a tool that will crank out random addresses for a given domain using the same methods the spammers use to create them(random names, number of characters, etc), then spit these out in mailto: links to be posted in web pages.
That's the premise of "Son of Spam": Let them grab one another's addresses and ddos one another.
Wanna help?
Springs hop eternal in the hearts of the eccentric....
greg posted this at 08:21 — 30th September 2007.
He has: 1,581 posts
Joined: Nov 2005
trouble is they aren't that daft
their outgoing email addresses are generally different to the ones they want you to reply to
so you set up an auto return spamming code and nothing comes of it as the server rejects anything to that address
thats if there is to be a reply, most spam is just ads, pay per click stuff and ppp ads they mass mail, they dont need return/reply emails so shut off the incoming mail
but I know your frustration. the best way is to defend yourself against it, filters etc, and use your time and energy on more productive things rather than stress and revenge
or you could just ddos
Leananshee posted this at 16:40 — 30th September 2007.
They have: 5 posts
Joined: Sep 2007
Well, yes, those kind of "anti-spam" measures are primitive at best, but that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm talking about setting spamtraps of legit and non addys from the original domain of the spam for spambots to pick up. The originating domain then receives incoming spam messages, which clogs its bandwidth whether it accepts them or not.
There's an organization called KnujOn that's had unparalleled success in doing a kind of forward traceroute on those links you just mentioned, and have shut down a fair number of these websites by so doing. Check 'em out.
This is not some newbie's fit of frustration; we designers and developers have had enough of what amounts to an attack on our livelihoods.
Springs hop eternal in the hearts of the eccentric....
pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 20:28 — 30th September 2007.
He has: 1,502 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
Sounds like you might find Project Honey Pot interesting.
Leananshee posted this at 23:29 — 30th September 2007.
They have: 5 posts
Joined: Sep 2007
Absolutely. They and the folks at KnujOn are doing fine jobs, and should be commended for it. Matter of fact, Project Honeypot is using a variant of what I'm suggesting. I've been looking into both of them closely.
So why not hit these scum in as many places it can be made to hurt? Call me a vigilante; when you're out in the Wild West you need a few of 'em.
Springs hop eternal in the hearts of the eccentric....
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