Project Honey Pot and http:BL
April 27th, 2007 by Michael Hampton
Project Honey Pot made several announcements this week, the largest of them Thursday when it announced it had filed a $1 billion lawsuit against spammers on behalf of the members of Project Honey Pot. I’m proud to say I’ve been such a member for some time now, and will lend whatever assistance I can to efforts to stop spam.
Project Honey Pot has been targeting email spam for years. But now it has also quietly launched an initiative to target blog comment spam. I’m proud to say I’m also participating in that effort.
On Wednesday, the project announced http:BL, a DNS-based blacklist of IP addresses which have been seen harvesting email addresses and sending email and comment spam. This is just about exactly what I had in mind when I announced the Bad Behavior Blackhole almost two years ago; Project Honey Pot has actually built something better.
I’ve spent the last day or so evaluating http:BL and found that its design is unfortunately not amenable to adding directly in to Bad Behavior, as it has significant technical differences from other DNS-based blacklists.
Therefore, I’m writing a separate http:BL plugin for WordPress. I’m currently testing it here and I hope to make the first release in the next few days.
Project Honey Pot relies on webmasters who want to actively participate in stopping spam. But the project has only a few bloggers running honey pots, so it’s not yet catching a lot of comment spam bots.
You can help by signing up for Project Honey Pot and installing a honey pot on your blog, forum or wiki.
Your honey pot, along with millions of others, will trap spambots of all types and feed its data into http:BL, which will improve the service for everyone.
