Information:
How does spamtracker work?
spamtracker consist of serveral modules:
Honeypot
In order to develop a spam protection method, we first have to serve the harvester unique email addresses. For this, it's necessary
to attract an email harvester to a honeypot website. On this website we generate unique email addresses containig the ip address
of the harvester and the current timestamp of the webserver. The email adresses will be encoded with caesar encryption so it's not
obvious for the harvesters that they are beeing tracked with specially prepared email addresses.
Secondary effect
By feeding the harvesters with a lot of useless and unvalid email addresses (spamtrap), spamtracker helps fighting the spammers.
If more and more harvesters are stealing useless fake email addresses, the spammers are wasting their time by writing spam mails
to nobody.
recording harvester intelligence
Spamtracker is also able to determine how many email harvesters are able to detect spam protection measures like email address cloaking.
Because there are different email harvesters with different levels of harvesting intelligence, we're preparing email addresses
with differnet kinds of protection methods. The more email adresses a harvester can collect, the more intelligent and dangerous he is.
Spamtracker server
After having harvested your email addresses, the harvesters will provide spammers with the collected email addresses.
Thus spammers will send you email spam to the collected email addresses.
Linker module
The linker module of the spamtracker anti spam software will fetch all messages that are sent to the generated email adresses.
After fetching the messages, they will be analysed. Spamtracker will extract all important data, like the recipient or the
sending date. This email address will be compared with the email addresses in the harvester database. If there is a match,
the received spam email is caused by the harvester who has harvested that particular email adress. Spamtracker will also parse
the mail body for advertising links. Because spam emails normally advertise for some bizarre and weired products, the link is pointing to the server of the person
who is responsible for the spam and for operating that website.
Localisation module
If spamtracker has found a match of harvester and received spam, e.g. the harvested emailaddress is the same like the recipient of the
mail, the localisation module will be started. Spamtracker takes the IP address of the harvester and the URL in the advertising
mail and determines it's geological location.
Harvester-Spammer-Link module
All of this happens automatically. Even the harvester-spam link module will start automatically, generating ready to use
data for the spamtracker client. This data will be transferred to the spamtracker client via xmlrpc communication.
Spamtracker client
If you want to check the current state of all harvester - spam connections, you will use the spamtracker-client. This program,
offers you the possibility to connect to your spamtracker server. In case you have more than one spamtracker server, you can
use the connection manager to create, modify or delete connections. After having selected a connection, the client will communicate
with the according server in order to get the data to display. Within varios screens, the data will be put into different graphs,
so you can get a better idea about the locations the email harvesters and spammers are working from.
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