Catching Spammers With Project Honey Pot
Using Anti-Bot plugins that feed off of a blacklist of known Spammers is really only half of your security job. John H. Gohde reviews a plugin that makes participating in trapping evil bots and identifying them as spammers both easy and fun.
Project Honey Pot
Project Honey Pot was developed by Matthew Prince in order to combat the spam bots that are constantly crawling the Internet. But, if the project is going to be successful they have to depend on Web site operators to help catch spammers who harvest email addresses from their webpages and/or leave comment spam.
Quite a few Anti-bot plugins, like Bad Behavior, depend upon using the Project Honey Pot’s blacklist of known spammers for a 30-day trial period. After that trial period is over, Project Honey Pots grants access to their blacklist only to active participants.
This is where the WP-HoneyPot plugin, version 1.0 by Stuart Ryan comes to the rescue. It helps make being an active participant almost painless.
If you are already successfully using the Bad Behavior plugin that was previously reviewed then you have signed up for Project Honey Pot. And, have already obtained an Access Key.
Become A Project Honey Pot Active Participant
The next step is to access the Project Honey Pot Web site and then login with your password. In the right side sidebar under Sites on Which You’ve Installed Honey Pots you would simply click on the Install A New Honey Pot hyperlink. This will take you to the Mange Honey Pots webpage. If you can install plugins on your WordPress blog then you generally will be able to install a Honey Pot which is nothing but a dynamic software trap designed to catch bots in the act of harvesting a dummy email address from your Web site. To particpate, all you have to do is provide the URL of your blog’s home page. And select PHP as the scripting language choice. Then select the remaining default options, by clicking on the submit form button on the bottom of the page.
From there on you simply have to follow the instructions, mainly by making a few more clicks. You will end up with a special project webpage, called a Honey Pot, with a PHP extension that you have to upload to the root directory of your WordPress blog. Having done that, you now have the potential of being able to trap evil bots crawling your blog. But, you still are not an active participant.
Installing the WP-HoneyPot plugin completes the integration of Project Honey Pot into your WordPress blog. Activating it enables the plugin to place hidden links on your blog designed to trap email address harvesters in a number of different locations. The existence of those hidden links on your blog made possible by the WP-HoneyPot plugin makes you an active participant. Those links are designed to be bait for spam bots, but are invisible to human visitors. The links will look something like the following.
And, here is yet another variation.
How Honey Pots Work
Okay, a bot follows the hidden bait link on your blog to your honey pot project webpage which tempts spam bots with a dummy email address or even a comment form. If the spam bot takes the bait, Project Honey Pot has just identified a new spam bot. And, you have helped maintained their blacklist of known spammers.
Installing the Bad Behavior plugin is only part of the solution. Setting up a Honey Pot on your blogs is only one part of the solution. Adding hidden links through out your site is required before you will actually be able to trap spammers. And, the WP-HoneyPot plugin makes this process almost painless.
The statistics on how many brand new spammers you have actually caught are maintained by the Project Honey Pot Web site, rather than by the plugin. The process of finding new spammers is rather slow, as all the blocks to your blog made possible by anti-bot plugins will be made against old established spammers.
