This free software acts as a spammer honeypot, deterring spambots from harvesting email addresses on websites.
BASTED is a powerful tool for system administrators looking to gain insight into the spam process. BASTED was designed with one primary goal in mind: tricking spambots into collecting randomly generated email addresses from a PHP script. This way, BASTED can collect valuable information from spambots and generate useful reports.
Spammers use programs that crawl websites and automatically collect text that matches the email address format. They then use those addresses to send unsolicited spam mail. BASTED tricks these spambots into collecting randomly generated email addresses instead. These email addresses are in the format [email protected] and should be handled by your MTA to forward all mail traffic into one mailbox.
Once mail is received on that mailbox, a Perl script parses the mailbox and inserts the mail message into BASTED's database. BASTED is then able to generate abuse reports with all the associated data for the spam mail received. BASTED is an effective tool for monitoring/trapping spammers.
It's important to note that BASTED generates email addresses using a pronounceable word algorithm. This makes sure that the email address appears valid to any filters running on the crawler's side. Through its web-based administrative interface, BASTED can generate reports about spam-mail received and usernames/mailboxes generated by the PHP script. It can also report IP addresses of spammers and spam crawlers, associate those results, and more.
BASTED is written in PHP and Perl, and requires a mail server accepting spam mail for a DNS record, as well as a web server to host the PHP scripts for the honeypage and the administrative interface. It's important to note that BASTED is developed, licensed and distributed under the terms of the BSD License.
Spammers use programs that crawl websites and automatically collect text that matches the email address format. They then use those addresses to send unsolicited spam mail. BASTED tricks these spambots into collecting randomly generated email addresses instead. These email addresses are in the format [email protected] and should be handled by your MTA to forward all mail traffic into one mailbox.
Once mail is received on that mailbox, a Perl script parses the mailbox and inserts the mail message into BASTED's database. BASTED is then able to generate abuse reports with all the associated data for the spam mail received. BASTED is an effective tool for monitoring/trapping spammers.
It's important to note that BASTED generates email addresses using a pronounceable word algorithm. This makes sure that the email address appears valid to any filters running on the crawler's side. Through its web-based administrative interface, BASTED can generate reports about spam-mail received and usernames/mailboxes generated by the PHP script. It can also report IP addresses of spammers and spam crawlers, associate those results, and more.
BASTED is written in PHP and Perl, and requires a mail server accepting spam mail for a DNS record, as well as a web server to host the PHP scripts for the honeypage and the administrative interface. It's important to note that BASTED is developed, licensed and distributed under the terms of the BSD License.
What's New
Version 0.2: N/A