Sniffing out Spammers

Sometimes I imagine how satisfying it would be to track down a spammer or telemarketer's office, like the man in the Snickers commercial [1] who arrives at the office and gets his revenge. Unfortunately, legal and logistical reasons often prevent this. Additionally, it is often the case that the perpetrators are botnets rather than the spammers themselves. Still, it would be interesting to create a graph that pinpoints the geographic regions in which most spam activities originate.

The Internet is the ideal platform for anonymous trickery, but the perpetrator's deeds actually leave a trail – each incoming request on a website includes the sender's IP address (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Link spammers leave their IP addresses in the web server's access log.

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