We've recently protected all of our hosted web sites with honeypots from ProjectHoneyPot.org.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website.

If you're hosting a web site, you can participate by placing honey pots on your site. These are links — usually hidden from humans — to pages that contain enticing email links for luring web spiders only. When one of these is clicked, the spider has confessed its ill intent and turned itself in to Project Honeypot, where it is then placed in a growing database of malicious IP addresses that are tracked and continually evaluated to determine their threat level.

This helps to support another service of Project Honeypot known as httpBL. This service helps you block traffic from malicious IPs. When traffic arrives at your site, a quick DNS lookup at Project Honeypot determines whether the IP is harmless or a known threat, allowing you to block it from ever gaining access to your site.

This service is available in a variety of hosting implementations, and since we're big believers in Drupal, we've recently donated some time and open-source effort to updating an early, outdated version of Drupal's httpBL module. We're now running it in tests on all of our hosted sites, and it's truly amazing to see how much bogus traffic is out there, and gratifying to know that we're now slamming the door in its face. We also keep a local cached record so that repeat visitors — friend or foe — don't require repeated DNS lookups, so there's minimal resource impact on the site.

The bottom line: known threats are no longer gaining access to our sites. New and unknown threats can still gain access, but are attracted to the honeypots, so they'll soon make themselves known and then they too will be blocked from access in the future.

What's not to like about that?