Unfortunately spamhole’s day is mostly behind us though I wish I would have been familiar with it earlier. The spamhole application developers took the approach of developing spamhole for other like minded individuals to assist in battling the SPAM issues on the Internet by creating fake open mail relays as possible and thus tricking spammers into sending their SPAM into blackholes or honeypots. It would have been extremely satisfying to watch SPAM enter a spamhole fake open relay I had created and be redirected to nothing. The spamhole application is not working as of Backtrack 5 R3 and is explained in more detail below.
While spammers have evolved from the days of sending SPAM through open relays only I am confident this still happens on misconfigured servers, virus infected computers, etc. Basically spamhole mimicked one of these SMTP open relays and accepted all mail while sending back confirmation to the spammer that email was being accepted and sent without issue.
I initially thought spamhole may be broken because it was attempting to attach to port 25 within Backtrack where Postfix is already attached however after downloading spamhole and recompiling with new settings the same error is received. As you can see below when attempting to launch spamhole from Backtrack Linux you will receive an error.
Error Launching spamhole In Backtrack 5 R3:
- root@bt:/pentest/exploits/spamhole# ./spamhole
- spamhole reference implementation 0.4 by I)ruid [CAU]
- root@bt:/pentest/exploits/spamhole# bind: Address family not supported by protocol
- root@bt:/pentest/exploits/spamhole#
If anyone has updated the spamhole code to work in Backtrack please let us know either via the contact form or via the comments below because the main spamhole project has not been updated since 2003. Any time that SPAM can be redirected to a blackhole while the spammer believes they are flooding SPAM to innocent recipients then that is a good day!
