Honeypot Reaches 10,000 Posts
As some of you may already know, I’ve been running a honeypot for quite a while now to collect data for the bbProtection service as well as using it to monitor interesting spam patterns.
The pot is a basic install of phpBB3 without any modifications, and with user registration set to no authentication. There is currently one forum that spammers are able to leave messages in and a link to another pot run by Dave “drathbun” Rathbun. Dave’s pot currently has around 30,000 posts, an absolute mammoth amount of spam in the relatively short time that it has been set up.
So, it is with a little twinge of sadness that I report that the pot has reached 10,000 spam posts inside it. I suppose I am currently fortunate in the fact that I currently don’t have any boards of my own to run and so don’t really see the spam problem on a day-to-day basis. But for someone like Dave or any other board owner out there this is clearly a real problem.
Hopefully bbProtection will go a long way to solving this problem and allowing board owners to concentrate on running their communities rather than sorting out spam, but for now I’ll keep running the pot and see what flies in 
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November 18th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Now over 35,000 posts and almost 5,000 users, and as far as I can tell there is a spammer online 24 hours a day. I’m going to add a script that captures who is online at ten minute intervals and confirm that. Scary, huh.