p2pnet.net News:- William Keeley got sick and tired of all the spam, but filtering it out wasn’t enough. He also wanted to return the favour to the people who’d spammed him in the first place.

So he created SpamFryer, a handy little app that turns it back on marketeers who use unwanted and unasked for e-junk to try to con possible punters into visiting their sales sites.

Keeley told us he was also planning on boosting his anti-spam efforts by giving people who are as sick of the stuff as he is, a way to post valid-looking, but fake, information to the order pages of websites advertised in spam junk-mail.

Meet Spammer Slammer, hosted here. All you do is simply paste information on the site screen to the appropriate form entry blanks on spamvertised webpages. If they ask for info not shown by SpammerSlammer, just make it up. Hit ‘refresh’ to generate new names and associated data from a dbase which matches area code, city, state and zip.

Here’s an example:

Celeste Jackson
505 S. Martin Luther King Street
Melbourne, FL 32912
407 287 5976
VISA: 4024007141060425
MASTER CARD: 5250116283920551

“My program picks out a random position within this database,” says Keeley. “It stores a matching city, state, zip and area code. It then generates the telephone number prefix and last 4 digits randomly. For the First name, Last name, and street name, my program has a list of common common names which it chooses at random. As for the credit card numbers, I was going to generate those at random and pass them through a number validation routine, but I changed my mind because I was afraid that my program may generate a credit card number that is being currently used.

“I decided to randomly pick from a list a of standard credit card numbers that are used to test credit card terminals. I don’t know if a declined credit card number costs a spammer any money to process, but I do know that banks may become wary from receiving bogus (not fraudulent) information constantly from specific sites.”

What are the chances of someone using the data for nefarious purposes? - we asked Keeley.

“It would be near impossible,” he told us. “This is what took me so long to research. The program picks from a list of known standard test credit card numbers.”

p2pnet suggested that “near impossible” wasn’t “impossible” and that Murphy’s Law whereby anything bad that can happen, will happen, should be considered.

“The only way for Murphy’s Law to happen is if the entire credit card industry decided to retire these test account numbers and start using them as regular account numbers,” Keeley promises.

At the moment, you have to go to the web site to use Spammer Slammer. But Keeley says if there’s enough interest, and if he gets good feedback, he’ll probably write a stand-alone version as well.

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See:-
possible punters - Meet SpamFryer, p2pnet, December 10, 2004
web site - Spammer Slammer, December 28, 2004

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 28th, 2004 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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