Thursday, January 18, 2007

First CAN-SPAM Conviction

The Mercury News has an article on a spammer facing up to 101 years. He was found guilty of phishing spam (thanks to the CAN-SPAM act), wire fraud, and a bunch of other stuff. Sounds like he got off easy.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Honeypot Cleaning

Its been a long time since I cleaned out my spam trap wiki. The main page is not even usable anymore. It and one other page have reached two megabytes. Even if everyone was on high speed internet, that is not good for a start page.

The last time I cleaned the wiki was August 5. For a small infrequently used wiki that amount of time is not really that unusual. Back in August I had to clean 27 pages. This time it looks like I cleaned 36 pages. You really must use some kind of spam protection if you want a usable wiki. Spammers created some really stupid pages, my favorite is:
Guestbook Spam Collection/mw/mw/wiki/Talk:Guestbook Spam Collection/wiki/Talk:Guestbook Spam Collection/mw/mw/wiki/Talk:Guestbook Spam Collection/mw/index.php

Spam on my Google Spam page started off slow, only five spams for nearly four months, then near the end of November someone from 81.177.14.26 started hammering my wiki. Up until November 22, that IP address had hit me six times; after that it hit various pages 336 times until January 15.
  1. (hist) Google Spam (2,098,046 bytes)
  2. (hist) Main Page (2,097,958 bytes)
  3. (hist) Guestbook Spammers/mw/index.php (1,227,992 bytes)
  4. (hist) Guestbook Spam Collection (78,014 bytes)
  5. (hist) My spam blacklist (38,568 bytes)
  6. (hist) Spam (32,691 bytes)
  7. (hist) First Spam (28,572 bytes)
  8. (hist) Spam Caught Here (27,533 bytes)
  9. (hist) Test (27,023 bytes)
  10. (hist) Interesting Searches (24,794 bytes)
  1. Main Page (427 revisions)
  2. Google Spam (142 revisions)
  3. Test (110 revisions)
  4. CSS Hidden Spam (97 revisions)
  5. Guestbook Spammers/mw/index.php (68 revisions)
  6. Wiki Spam Collection (66 revisions)
  7. My spam blacklist (39 revisions)
  8. Suggestions (29 revisions)
  9. Spam Caught Here (22 revisions)
  10. First Spam (18 revisions)
  1. Main Page (7,851 views)
  2. CSS Hidden Spam (3,010 views)
  3. Wiki Spam Collection (2,598 views)
  4. Test (2,449 views)
  5. Guestbook Spam Collection (2,419 views)
  6. Google Spam (1,870 views)
  7. My spam blacklist (1,273 views)
  8. Suggestions (1,173 views)
  9. Spam Caught Here (753 views)
  10. First Spam (742 views)