Group 42

Seen at Schneier on Security, Project Honey Pot is going after spammers in a big way:

On Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 10:54am in a court in the Eastern District of Virginia, Project Honey Pot filed the largest anti-spam lawsuit ever. Seeking more than $1B in statutory damages, the suit was brought on behalf of our members. It targets a huge swath of spammers. If you've harvested email addresses or sent spam in the last two years, chances are you're on our radar screen and we're coming after you.

Announcement here: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/5days_thursday.php

Here's crossing our collective fingers that this makes a dent!

Nothing like checking your email and seeing 143 new comments on your website. But wait, they all happened in the space of 2 minutes! One hell of a flame war or . . . spam.

Fortunately, not a single one of the comments was published thanks to Akismet!

The timing is interesting. The website listed in my drupal.org profile was an old one. I updated my Drupal profile website entry to this site only a day before the barrage. Of course this makes sense. People registered on drupal.org have a high probability of having a Drupal website. It's a perfect place to troll. Could this be an opportunity for a spam honey pot? Fake user profiles on drupal.org and some log analysis to correlate which spiders are harvesting addresses?

It's also interesting to see which articles were hit. There definitely isn't an even distribution. My note on Akismet was hit the most in the "blitz". The David Siffry post gets a slow but constant stream. The spam has slacked off to nothing, again; I'm hopefully not tempting fate by saying this.