Bad Cat
Posted by Ian Holsman
zyons is famous. :-)
it has at least one spammer attacking it on a regular basis.
“PussyCat 1.0, Murzillo compatible” is the user agent in question.
my logs show that is is coming in from ~50 different IP’s in the past week.
I’m proud to say you wouldn’t be able to tell, but I see it on the error logs, and if zyons gets more attention the spammers will adjust themselves and figure out a way to deal with it.
now.. I could just ban it, but that is just making it some one elses problem as it will just jump to the next url in it’s list which isn’t really helping is it?
So I was thinking.. there are tarpits for email, but are there tarpits for HTTP?
unfortuantly I don’t have a spare IP or machine/VPS to dedicate to the task, but I am willing to maintain 5-6 of them if someone will supply those.
then when you get a spammy type request you can just redirect it, or make invisible forms on your pages which link to it. you could even hook it up to a RBL which black lists the IP as well.
The idea behind it is to slow down the spammers and make it more expensive for them to run.
Unfortuantly I can’t think of a business model which will make this system self-sustaining.
Anybody want to come up with some sponsorship, IP’s and VPS’s I can use? I think i could get a apache module going does something similar to Spam Cannibal
and we would then need something like dyndns to maintain a list of active tarpits. (seriously)
or am I being my usual clueless self, and missing an existing implementation somewhere?