OMNINOGGIN

You may not know it, but your site is probably being regularly harvested for email addresses. In this post I will show you how to easily help fight email spam using a Lojack technique called List Poisoning (see previous post for more Lojack anti-spam philosophy). Though this is not a new technique, it is definitely worth spreading the word and implementing.

The goal here is to pollute the harvester’s email list with fake email addresses and fake recursive links. In doing so, the harvester will waste time and resources harvesting and spamming fake addresses. (see this in action)

In the demo below, you will notice that the first three links are recursive links that will just redirect to the same index.php. The next set of links will be fake email addresses generated for harvesters.

Demo: http://omninoggin.com/suspicious

Download: List Poisoning Package

Installation

1. Unpack list-poisoning.zip into a directory on your web server. Make sure to name the directory something unique (i.e. don’t use “spamtrap/” or anything that describes its funcionality).
2. Open .htaccess and modify
   

   “RewriteRule . /suspicious/index.php [L]”

   to

   “RewriteRule . /youruniquedirectory/index.php [L]”

3. Place a link on your site that links to this new directory.
4. You may make this link invisible to visitors by applying the following CSS style on the link:

   .your_unique_class {
     display:block;
     visibility:hidden;
     height:0px;
   }

5. Verify that it works by visiting your trap directory on the web browser and clicking on some recursive links to make sure that you can recurse. For example, my trap is located at http://omninoggin.com/suspicious.

That should be all! As always, if you have a better way of doing this, or have tips/tricks on List Poisoning, then please share in comments.