How Honeypot Can Help You Protect Your Website?
Saurabh Tiwary | 26th August 2016
If website spam is a prickle in your side, it is high time you hitched the spammers with a honeypot. Website spam that we are talking about is the automatically submitted data that frequently attacks your website by wasting resources, time and challenging the rigidity of your website’s security.
What is a Honeypot?
A honeypot is a kind of snare or a trap which is set to detect and counteract the unauthorized attempts to use a website or a computer system. A number of websites come across spam attacks in the form of junk form submissions or via different attempts made to find the vulnerabilities. They often jam contact forms and the product inquiry fields of your website resulting into generation of hundreds and thousands of spam comments everyday.
A number of spammers and automated bots keep on crawling the web to find your forms and then automatically submit any random junk data to your website which is called spamdom. Apart from this, this process unfairly attempts to make you click on any hyperlink connecting to a spamdom. It also digs for a way into your server to collect data or obtain customer information or even gain control of your website. Also, a honeypot lets you further reduce the automated spam so that it cannot submit any comment or try to obtain data through your website.
How Does Honeypot Work?
Suppose you have a contact form on your website that includes fields like name, email, mobile number and a message. The automated crawlers and spammers look for fields of any kind to complete and send. A honeypot consists of a field which is hidden from regular users but it is visible to the automated spammers that try filling any field with data. When all the form fields are filled up with data which takes fraction of seconds, the spammer makes efforts to submit the form. However, if the hidden fields include data, the form fill up simply fails and does not get submitted.
Apart from this, honeypot can also incorporate a timer that would make sure that a form fill up takes at least a couple of seconds to complete the entire process. Since automated spam moves very fast i.e. they just clicks a large number of forms within seconds which is practically impossible for a human being. So, whenever a form is filled too fast it is certainly some automated method. And the honeypot will restrict the data to be submitted to the website. Although Honeypots reduce spam comments, they do not stop all the spam submissions.
The usefulness of Honeypot in a website’s security cannot be denied. However, in any web design project, a design company makes use of various tools and resources to ensure 100% spam free website. Any expert designer tends to use wordpress plugins or other means apart from Honeypot to get rid of spams.
