After having my blog badly screwed up for an hour last night by some spammer’s email harvesters, I’ve set up my defences, and I am going to return those spammers a favour. If you have noticed, I’ve put a whole series of links under the section called Anti-Spam in my right sidebar (you might have to scroll down to see it).

These irritating automated harvesting software work by scanning for email addresses on webpages, and then jump to another website via the hyperlinks on the page that it just scanned to continue the insidious activity. The @#$%^ harvester last night jumped around my blog so quickly that some of my wordpress plug-ins could not take the load and brought down the server. Since the harvesters like to jump around using hyperlinks to harvest emails, I’ve kindly provided them some links under the Anti-Spam section.

If you click on those links, you will be brought to pages that spews out large amounts of invalid email addresses randomly. Included in those pages are links to other pages that randomly generates large amounts of invalid email addresses. So any irritating harvester that comes by my page the next time will jump to those pages, grab all the invalid email addresses, jump to yet other pages that have large amounts of invalid email addresses to grab them. The cycle will continue and pretty soon that spammer’s server will just crash (and hopefully spew smoke as well).

To add to the fun, I’ve planted a number of totally invalid email addresses on my blog’s code which are invisible to humans but contain all kinds of funky ASCII characters that will make the harvester software go amok trying to interpret them. In addition, there’s a couple of “honey pots” on my blog as part of my effort to fight spam. The “honey pots” lure the spammer’s harvester to collect the email address and when the spammer sends junk mail to that email, the servers at projecthoneypot.org will be alerted and they will put out the spammer’s IP address publicly for law enforcement officers to track down the spammer.

(There are some Singaporeans harvesting email addresses to spam too. See this link from Project Honey Pot.)

If you’re interested to have some fun with the spammers’ email harvesting software, place the anti-spam links on your site or blog as well and let those buggers crash their own systems. *evil laugh*