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The Digital Cockroach Bait Station: Building Spam Honeypots

Robert Simmons

Robert Simmons explains how to construct high-volume spam honeypots to capture live malware binaries, track bulletproof hosts, and harvest threat intel.

Summary

The Value of Spam Traps for Malware Collection

Spam honeypots remain one of the most effective and cost-efficient mechanisms for gathering zero-day malware binaries and monitoring active exploit campaigns.

Designing the Spam Bait Architecture

Robert Simmons details configuring MX mail relays, seeding harvested email addresses across open forums, and automating payload extraction.

Extracting Threat Intelligence and Campaign Artifacts

Simmons demonstrates analyzing malicious attachment metadata, tracking bulletproof hosting infrastructure, and clustering malware distribution networks.

Automating Ingestion and Threat Scoring

The presentation provides open-source processing scripts to score incoming spam attachments and ingest indicators into threat intelligence platforms.

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