Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters

Perl can't save the world (well, maybe...) but it can help stop spammers. I've written a generalized webpage and email faker: Spider Catcher. Simply, the tool generates faked web pages, based on a user defined template, containing peppered bogus emails. The trick is to get the script to link to itself under a different link, trapping a harvesting spider. To be fair to legitimate search engine spiders, the catcher can be modified in the future to respond differently to various user-agents.

It uses Markov chains and a babelizer to generate semi-coherent content from arbitrary input text. The code is downloadable on the page itself.

I can imagine this would make an impact on the spammers' databases if a large number of webmasters implemented this.

I got the idea for it from the IMDB's harvest pages.

Edit: chipmunk 2001-06-18

Comment on Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters

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Re: Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters by petdance (Parson) on Jun 13, 2001 at 16:22 UTC
Here's another implementation that's been around a while: Wpoison. xoxo, Andy %_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ". # Andy Lester 'Perl ;@; a;a;j;m;er;y;t;p;n;d;s;o;'. # http://petdance.com "hack";print map delete$_{$_},split//,q< andy@petdance.com >	[reply]
Re: Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters by Anonymous Monk on Jun 13, 2001 at 11:21 UTC
The correct URL is www.quoteserver.ca/spidercatch	[reply]
Re: Spider-catcher: anti-spam measures for email harvesters by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jun 14, 2001 at 01:33 UTC
Another anti-spam idea I'm thinking about using: Use more than one email address for newsgroup posts. Identical mail arriving at both addresses is "harvested" and tosses as spam. Combining that with a spider catcher idea, you could have a dummy page with a special email address on it, and anything going there is assumed to be harvested spam, and that can be used as a template for what to filter out of other mailboxes. —John	[reply]