On Monday, December 5, 2005, 6:02:02 PM, John wrote:
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What is the best way to get a spam trap going. |
I forgot to mention another way to set up spamtraps that I definitely "don't recommend". It is, of course, highly theoretical and possibly dangerous ;-)
If a new pc (actually a very old PC with a fresh OS install) were to be placed on a cable modem or dsl line without appropriate virus protection or a firewall, then it would very quickly be taken over by spammers via viruses and worms and so forth. Of course, any email addresses found in files or address books on that box would very quickly fall into the hands of the blackhats.
You may have unwittingly tested this theory yourself when one of your family members hooked up their brand new PC to their brand new cable modem and shortly thereafter called you to figure out what was wrong with their new PC that worked just fine yesterday. They may have even been told by their provider's tech support to disable and remove any firewalls or security programs they had in place as part of the debugging process --- those things can interfere with network traffic, after all, and cause trouble to tech support folks. (My Mom has had this experience several times when dealing with her ISP, for example. Apparently it's a pretty standard part of the script to remove anything that stands between the DSL modem and the PC when trying to figure out why things aren't working. Of course, the end result is - often within fewer than 10 minutes - the unfortunate PC is completely compromised)
It's truly unfortunate how bad the Internet is these days.
Nobody should ever run a pc on the Internet without a good firewall and proper virus protection in place. It's just a bad idea.
_M
