This is about systematically identifying spammers and hence being able to block their activities.

Project Honey Pot (www.projecthoneypot.org) is a system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to copy addresses from people’s website. Spambots are automated pieces of software that can read websites and find and copy any email addresses.

Website administrators have few resources able to tell them whether a visitor to a site is good or malicious. Project Honey Pot was created in order to provide this information to website administrators in order to help them make informed decisions on who to allow onto their sites.

Project honeypot is a set of software you can install on your website and it will enable the project honey pot team to track spammers and provide lists of repeat spammers.

To do this, webmasters install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. Project Honey Pot  handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, they anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to 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.

They collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. They also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

Project Honey Pot is free to use.

There are also  “comment spammers”

Comment spammers do not send email spam. Instead, comment spammers post to blogs and forums. These posts typically include links to sites being promoted by the comment spammer. Project Honeypot can identify these comment spammers.

Resources

Project HoneyPot publish various useful information in the battle against spammers.

A list of the top IP addresses being used by comment spammers.

A list of the top URLs, domains, and keywords being promoted by comment spammers.

A list of the top IP addresses used by dictionary attackers.i.e. scammers who use every word in the dictionary to try to crack someone’s password.

Statistics

Project Honey Pot is monitoring 235 million addresses and 124 million IP addresses and has identified 267 thousand harvesters and 28 million dictionary attackers.That’s a great record.

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