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 Wpoison
Inoculating Your Web Site Against Email Harvesting
Overview
 Wpoison
is a free tool which can be used to help reduce the problem of bulk junk
e-mail on the Internet by thwarting the efforts of junk emailers who regularly
scan web pages, looking for target e-mail addresses to harvest (which they
subsequently bombard with junk e-mail).
The idea behind wpoison is really very simple. Junk emailers write programs
("robots") to automatically scan thousands and thousands of web
pages, looking for email addresses to which they then send unsolicited junk
email (or which they sell to other spammers). These programs can be easily
fooled into accepting lots and lots of completely fake and useless e-mail
addresses, as long as the bogus addresses appear to reside on ordinary nondescript
web pages. That is where Wpoison's role comes in.
Wpoison creates dynamically generated Web pages full of convincingly lifelike
- but completely bogus - email addresses that spambots will pick up and
add to their hitlists. But the page also contains randomly generated links
that the bot inevitably follows - links that loop right back to the same
page, now re-armed with a fresh set of random fake email addresses. Caught
in an endless loop, the robots feed on the addresses until they are bloated
and full.
Installation
To install wpoison, Telnet or
SSH to your Virtual Server and run the following command:
% cd (change
to your home directory)
% tar -xvf /usr/local/contrib/wpoison.tar
Implementation
In order to properly implement a site inoculation, you will want to use
a combination of empty <a href>
tags on your home page and throughout your web site à la <a
href="/leeches/index.html"></a> as well as add the following
lines to your web server config file (httpd.conf):
RewriteEngine
On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]
To prevent legitimate spiders from indexing the wpoison-generated pages,
create an entry in your robots.txt
file (or create the file in your ~/www/htdocs/directory
if it does not exist and add an entry) to "disallow" the /leeches/
directory. An example entry is shown below:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /leeches/
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Marketing With Email
