An e-mail honeypot addressing spammers' behavior in collecting and applying addresses

Abstract

Spam has become one of the most annoying and costly phenomenon in the Internet. Valid e-mail addresses belong to the most valuable resources of spammers, but little is known about spammers' behavior when collecting and harvesting addresses and spammers' capabilities and interest in carefully directed, consumer-oriented marketing have not been explored yet. Gaining insight into spammers' ways to obtain and (mis)use e-mail addresses is useful in many ways, e.g. for the assessment of the effectiveness of address obscuring techniques and the usability and necessity of hiding e-mail addresses on the Internet. This paper presents a spam honeypot project in progress addressing these issues by systematically placing e-mail addresses in the Internet and analyzing received e-mails. The honeypot's conceptual framework, its implementation, and first empirical results are presented. Finally, an outlook on further work and activities is provided.