Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Help catch spammers and more - Project Honey Pot

A Honey Pot is a term for a computer, Web server, site, and the like that are purposefully left open to the Internet in an insecure manner so as to trap those trying to get unauthorized access to them.

Project Honey Pot is an organization that encourages us to get involved in the monitoring of malicious activity.

All of us who have Web sites, blogs, eCommerce sites, and more that are on the Internet are subject to many forms of malicious activities. Everything from e-mail address harvesting from our sites to comment spamming on our blogs are examples of the types of behaviours the Honey Pot Project is trying to monitor.

We can help by placing a hidden link on our sites and blogs to capture illicit robots/spiders that crawl them as one example. We can volunteer an MX record for a domain we own but do not use for e-mail. We can also setup a Honey Pot for them if we are so inclined.

Please, check it out, and if it suits you, get involved.

Honey Pot (Computing) definition on Wikipedia.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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