liamtog - spambot poisoning software

Releases/News

April 27, 2004:: Linux Journal prints a news item about liamtog.
Liamtog Users and Dev mail lists created.
liamtog 0.3 was released. Fixes an error in self-referencing URLs.
December 22, 2003:: liamtog 0.2 was released. This is a minor touch-up to the installation instructions only.
December 21, 2003:: liamtog 0.1 was released. See the announcement sent to SVLUG.

What is Liamtog?

Spammers regularly use "spambots" to scan web pages for e-mail addresses.

Liamtog is a spambot-poisoning script which generates a web of self-referencing links and bogus e-mail addresses in order to inject bad data into spammers' databases. Various amounts of intentional delays can be added to slow down aggressive spambots.

All spambot poisoning programs (including Liamtog) are intended to be deterrent against spammers using e-mail addresses found on your site. When using a spambot-poisoning program, so many of the addresses they get should be bad that they may as well throw out the whole batch.

Liamtog allows hooks so that if they do use any data from your site, you can catch it in a spam trap and adjust your spam filters as an integrated second line of defense. Spam traps and filters are not provided with Liamtog - you can already find that functionality with Open Source software packages which can work alongside liamtog:

Apache SpamAssassin (rules-based Spam filter)
Spamikaze (spam trap and DNSBL database)

Additional tips and advice are accepted for posting on this site.

Liamtog is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

Dependencies

Liamtog is written in Perl. It requires the Apache web server and at least a CGI environment (included with Apache) in order to run. If you have mod_perl, Liamtog can take advantage of it to keep its configuration between requests rather than re-read it every time.

Features

Liamtog's highlights include configurability, the ability to differentiate between virtual web servers and support for spam traps. Here's the list of features:

Liamtog displays randomly-generated pages making a web of self-referencing links and bogus e-mail addresses.
If one or more "spam trap" domains are configured, a small number of generated e-mail addresses will point into the spam trap domains. These traps can be used to update spam filters, though software to do that is not currently part of Liamtog.
Liamtog can be configured separately for different virtual web servers operating under the same Apache installation.
Randomly-generated pages can be configured for differing lengths and percentages for mixes of words, links and bogus addresses.

Alternatives

There has been spambot poisoning software for years. Liamtog was written for more configurability that the author wanted, particularly for virtual hosts and spam traps.

We're posting alternatives here. We're also interested to find out about others. Officially, this site supports your choice of any spambot poisoning system, as long as you actually do use one. If you choose to use Liamtog, it will be appreciated. Consider yourself invited to help develop liamtog (and contribute the changes back to the project) so it becomes your favorite choice and benefits others as well. But here are other choices which you can browse...

Ron Guilmette's wpoison: http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/ (source code available with restrictions)
Neil Gunton's Spambot Trap: http://www.neilgunton.com/spambot_trap/
Devin Carraway's sugarplum: http://www.devin.com/sugarplum/ (released under GPL)
Cliff's SpamBot Killer Script: http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts/spam/frame.shtml
Erik Schorr's blackflag.cgi: http://arpa.org/blackflag.pl
spam_the_spammers.py: http://www.mindrape.org/caffeine/spam/spam_the_spammers.py
Bruno Wolff's robot.pl: http://wolff.to/bruno/robot.pl
Aaron's Spambait: http://www.bait.nu/bait/
wpoison.php - PHP port of wpoison: http://radiofreeomaha.net:8080/wpoison/
Toxic Waste Dump: http://www.cexx.org/toxic.htm (runs on MS-DOS, generates static pages)
Tom Schneider's mkspamtrap: http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/spam/trap.html (C Shell script, generates static pages)

Author

Liamtog was written by Ian Kluft.