Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren’t going this little extra mile.<\/p>\n
\n\nSpammers are lazy<\/a><<\/p>\n
Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (
a@b.com<\/code> to produce a@b.com<\/samp>) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn’t take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel<\/a> address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed<\/a> address. I figured it wouldn’t take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.<\/p>\nThis morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the “Harvester Test” headline wasn’t quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don’t have time to really harden an address, it’s worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCR<\/acronym>s. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com<\/a>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’ve argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I’m sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was surprised to find that spammers weren’t Spammers are lazy Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (a@b.com to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn’t take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeky-stuff","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ezoons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}