mod_spambot / News: Recent posts

Mod_spambot, the plug-in to the Apache Web Server to prevent email address harvesting from website, has been upgraded to release 1.0. This release marks confidence in the stability of the project and it's use in production environments.

One of the largest sources of email addresses for "spam" targets are
web sites. Email addresses are read ("harvested") from them and
put into databases of addresses that are sold to spammers. Most
systems' administrators will know from looking through their database
of accesses that they are often victims of such harvest attacks
by software known as spambots.

A new release of the leading anti-spambot technology, mod_spambot, has
been released today, 7th August 2005. This new release, 0.47, has
a number of new features compared with the previous release 0.46. They
include:
A honey pot system to leave spambots in knots downloading
useless data without a large impact on the web server
An improved monitoring system, so that web site administrators
can see who is being blocked... read more

The principal differences from release 0.45 are:
Better handling of mmap (fixes an occasional segfault when unloading on Apache 1.3)
The first block of a site is now logged at NOTICE level
SpamBotDenyCode should now work with SpamBotRedirectPath
Use the Apache built-in MD5 routines when handling mod_usertrack cookies

Mod_spambot release 0.44 has been announced today 12/4/05.

Mod_spambot is an Apache plugin that stops spambots from downloading a website. The primary differences from 0.43 are:
* Optional co-operation with mod_usertrack to identify sites
* Improved handling of vhosts, with better per vhost configurability
* Optional per-site throttling
* Ability to configure which file types are considered targets for spambots (e.g. html, but not jpg)

Mod_spambot release 0.43 has been announced today 11/2/05.

Mod_spambot is an Apache plugin that stops spambots from downloading a website. The primary differences from 0.42 are:
* A bug fix where HTML downloads could be flagged twice
* Logging of blocks to error_log
* Cleaner handling of the debug file (Apache 2.0 only)

Version 0.42 of mod_spambot has been released.

Mod_spambot is an Apache plugin which monitors the data being downloaded from a server. When
the number of requests for a client exceeds a preset level no more downloads
are allowed for a preset time. When this happens the client received a tailored
message informing them of what has happend. Many of the features can be
tailored to the needs of the webmaster to help to prevent false positives and
to customise the definition of a client to be blacklisted.... read more

* Added per directory option support (except whitelists)
* Added SpamBotReuseTime
* Don't count HEAD requests
* Better memory allocation
* Added version information to the Apache headers

Mod_spambot, the apache plugin that prevents spambots and unwanted mirrors from downloading your site, now supports Apache1.3 in addition to Apache2.0.

A version of mod_spambot for Apache1.3 has been released and tested on NetBSD2.0.

Currently this code is in CVS only, when I have tested the code under Linux I will issue mod_spambot0.40 with Apache1.3 support.

Version 0.32 of mod_spambot has been released.

Mod_spambot is an Apache plugin which prevents unwanted mirroring and spambots from downloading your site.

0.32 has improved the white list specifications over 0.31, including netmasks to ease the whit listing of spiders from more than one IP address, e.g. Google.

The third draft of mod_spambot is now available from CVS.

At present CVS is the only download mechanism, this will change very soon.