Ingenious Way To Fight Spammers

From: Slashdot.org

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Spamholes Fighting Spammers
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 09, @08:12AM
from the simple-and-clever dept.
mike9010 writes "A person named I)ruid has come up with an ingenious way to combat those spammers. His program, spamhole, creates a false 'open relay' that the spammer thinks he/she can send messages through. The messages then get sent nowhere, and the spammer has no idea. "spamhole is an open project. Hopefully, through user's and developer's contributions, we will amass a collection of spamhole implementations spanning all commonly used platforms, programming languages, etc. Ease of configuration and use are the primary objectives, for the easier to use by the non-techical layperson the implementations are, the more widely adopted and used spamhole will become.""

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Click the following link:
http://www.spamhole.net/

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spamhole is an open project. Hopefully, through user's and developer's contributions, we will amass a collection of spamhole implementations spanning all commonly used platforms, programming languages, etc. Ease of configuration and use are the primary objectives, for the easier to use by the non-techical layperson the implementations are, the more widely adopted and used spamhole will become. Users should feel that they can do their part in the fight against spam by running an easy to use and configure spamhole. Of secondary importance are additional features which may or may not be common to all implementations. Please join the developer mailing list for further discussion!

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Now that's a very smart idea.

I know that the topic of using fake stmp relays was mention in one of the posts. But I saw that no one mention this program though. So I thought that you guys might find this info interesting. Hope that you guys like it.

wasn't CaptainCrunch working on that?

Who's CaptainCrunch never heard of him ?

Guy that invented first phreakbox (bluebox), he's even a member here but rarely posts:

http://www.antionline.com/member.php...o&userid=72810

http://www.elfqrin.com/docs/hakref/p...reakboxes.html :

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The mother of all boxes. The first box in history, which started the whole phreaking scene. Invented by John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch") in the early 60s, who discovered that by sending a tone of 2600Hz over the telephone lines of AT&T, it was possible to make free calls.

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How do you know he is the real Captain Crunch, i mean its the internet, its very easy to impersonate someone.

Even i could say i am Kevin Mitnick or whatever.

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Originally posted here by Tedob1
wasn't CaptainCrunch working on that?

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He appears to knows about the technique, but I am not sure where he was heading with it.

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Originally posted here by John Draper
yes - this is a common spammer trick. They just make as 1 x 1 pixel image, and use that as a "tracker" to see if the Email address is good. In our case, of course it's good..... It's a honeypot, one of millions that can be spread around for the PIGS (spammers) to wallow in.

But what can really get spammers is to infiltrate them with Honeypot SMTP servers. They use scanners to look for them. So when a scanner comes across a honeypot, they are going to pounce on it like pigs in ****. Playing to their Greed, they will be amazed at how fast the honeypot works (it really doesn't have to do anything - other then give them the impression the mail is going through). In meantime, while the spammer is running their spammer program, true logging takes place, and since they are directly connecting to it (they have to), then I get a true log of their real origin, and NOT the ISP's mail server IP. I would have the DSL/Cable/ or dialup port IP. From that, I can track them down (through cooperation of their local provider).

Normally, spammers would use an open relay (one of millions out there), but these are usually in China (which means it's a lot slower and less desirable to use), because spammers are GREEDY, and want to spew out as much as possible in the shortest time. But going through these gatways offer little opportunity to track them, because they are hiding two or more layers deep, so it's a loosing battle.

Once a spammer stumbles into a honeypot, they can be tracked.

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Cheers:

John Draper ah yes I remember reading about him. He was the one that got his handle after using some whistle that came in a cereal box. With the whistle he was able to mimic the proper sound to make free phone calls. He's the father of phreaking if I am correct.

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How do you know he is the real Captain Crunch, i mean its the internet, its very easy to impersonate someone.

Even i could say i am Kevin Mitnick or whatever.

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Of course, but you can believe it's him, you're never 100% sure of course but the chance is big enough it's him.

it's him