Longtime behavior of harvesting spam bots
Oliver Hohlfeld, Thomas Graf, Florin Ciucu · 2012
This paper investigates the origins of the spamming process, specifically concerning address harvesting on the web, by relying on an extensive measurement data set spanning over three years. Concretely, we embedded more than 23 million unique spamtrap addresses in web pages. 0.5% of the embedded trap addresses received a total of 620,000 spam messages. Besides the scale of the experiment, the critical aspect of our methodology is the uniqueness of the issued spamtrap addresses, which enables the mapping of crawling activities to the actual spamming process.