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A Short History of the Spambot TrapSpamivore is a version of a spambot trap, but these traps are not new. An application named Webpoison or Wpoison has existed for some time. Webpoison is a CGI script that keeps spambots busy by generating many bogus email addresses the spambot mindlessly gobbles. Not only is the time the spambots spend on your site wasted, but the email addresses are also useless. Rather poetic justice! For more information on Webpoision, see: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison and for information on Webpoison-type CGI's, see: http://www.turnstep.com/Spambot/lure.html. Unfortunately, spammers have learned to defeat Webpoison-type CGI traps. The new spambots simply ignore CGI scripts that appear to be spambot traps. To defend against these new spambots, Spamivore uses Server Side Includes, SSI, to hide CGI execution. For more information on SSI, see: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html. |