An e-mail honeypot addressing spammers´ behavior in collecting and applying addresses

Spam has become one of the most annoying and costly phenomenon in the Internet. Valid e-mail addresses belong to the most valuable resources of spammers, but little is known about spammers´ behavior when collecting and harvesting addresses and spammers´ capabilities and interest in carefully directed, consumer-oriented marketing have not been explored yet. Gaining insight into spammers´ ways to obtain and (mis)use e-mail addresses is useful in many ways, e.g. for the assessment of the effectiveness of address obscuring techniques and the usability and necessity of hiding e-mail addresses on the Internet. This paper presents a spam honeypot project in progress addressing these issues by systematically placing e-mail addresses in the Internet and analyzing received e-mails. The honeypot´s conceptual framework, its implementation, and first empirical results are presented. Finally, an outlook on further work and activities is provided.