OMNINOGGIN

Today I would like to announce the release of “Project Honey Pot Http:BL” WordPress Plugin.

Description

This plugin allows you to verify all visitors’ IP address against the Project Honey Pot database. Using the Http:BL API, this plugin flags, logs, and blocks visitors with a high threat score, helping you prevent harvesters, spammers, or other
suspicious bots from abusing your blog. I’ve been talking a lot about LoJack anti-spam measures lately and this is one of them.
This plugin requires you to sign up for a free account at Project Honey Pot so that you can use their Http:BL API to verify your visitors.
This plugin is based on Jan Stepien’s http:BL version 1.4 which is no longer being supported. This version of the plugin fixes a lot of database bugs and usability issues that the original plugin had. Here are the key benefits of having this plugin enabled.

1. LoJack anti-spam solution with collective intelligence
2. Easy Project Honey Pot integration. No need to mess with Apache mod_httpbl, which means that this will work on shared hosts.
3. Ability to redirect malicious bots to a bot trap.
4. Logging capabilities

Read on…

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.
Read on…

Every time I search the web for information on how to block spam bots, scrapers, and harvesters, I always see an Apache .htaccess file or some code to dump into httpd.conf to achieve this. I’m a bit against using this method for blocking evil bots. I do respect Apache for being a flexible & modular web server (that’s why I still use it), but I do not have much to boast about Apache’s speed and efficiency.

To achieve the same purpose on my server with greater efficiency, I made use of my Varnish reverse proxy configurations (located under /usr/local/etc/varnish/default.vcl).

In this post, I will only be discussing about vcl_recv subroutine, which gets called when a client request is received.
Read on…