[plug] A plan for spam spiders.

[Daniel J. Axtens]

> So when the spider finds a link to "DO NOT CLICK ME AS THIS PAGE WILL
> CRASH YOUR COMPUTER" which is also enticingly placed in robots.txt as
> forbidden fruit, it excitedly clicks through, recieves a gzipped html
> file, which it unpacks to view the hidden goodies, and BLAM! 1 gigabit of
> crud explodes in its head, depleting the spam servers memory, and vmem and
> causing the smoke to leak out of its vile little brain.
> 
> The question is;- WOULD IT WORK!

Would a spam spider ungzip a gzipped file?

Just wondering.

Daniel

On 5/7/05, Shayne O'Neill <shayne at guild.murdoch.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> One of the things that struck me while contemplating spam and the somewhat
> clever teergrubing technique is that these ideas are never applied at the
> coalfront of spam crime. The collection of email adresses. Web spiders
> seem to generate a fantastic amount of traffic, and when combined with
> dynamic pages on a web server, quite alot of webserver load.
> 
> I intend to fight back.
> 
> There are 2 types of spider. Good ones and bad ones. Good spiders , like
> google will read robots.txt , steer clear of directories the webmaster
> doesnt want spidered and importantly respect crawl delay settings asking
> it to mellow out.
> 
> SPam spiders however , I have observed, do not, they tend to bombard a
> webserver, sometimes to its knees, and completely ignore crawl-delay.
> 
> This is the signature of a spam spider.
> 
> I also imagine these spiders to be exceedingly poorly written.
> 
> What would happen if we configured our server, we set a trap that would
> lead a spam spider to a 'special' page, while warning off legit spiders
> via robots.txt.
> 
> My plan is that said page would then deliver a gzipped file consisting of
> one gigabyte of zero's to the spider gzipped down to a couple of hundred
> kilobytes. and sent identified as a gzipped html page.
> 
> So when the spider finds a link to "DO NOT CLICK ME AS THIS PAGE WILL
> CRASH YOUR COMPUTER" which is also enticingly placed in robots.txt as
> forbidden fruit, it excitedly clicks through, recieves a gzipped html
> file, which it unpacks to view the hidden goodies, and BLAM! 1 gigabit of
> crud explodes in its head, depleting the spam servers memory, and vmem and
> causing the smoke to leak out of its vile little brain.
> 
> The question is;- WOULD IT WORK!
> 
> Shayne.
> 
> --
>  I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to
> town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.
> - Jack Handey (And now, Deep thoughts)
> _______________________________________________
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> 


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