Http:BL Overview

What Is http:BL?

Http:BL is a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites. Project Honey Pot tracks harvesters, comment spammers, and other suspicious visitors to websites. Http:BL makes this data available to any member of Project Honey Pot in an easy and efficient way.

How can I take advantage of http:BL?

All active members of Project Honey Pot may use the basic http:BL service for free. To qualify as "active," merely install a honey pot, add a QuickLink to your site, donate an MX entry, or refer some friends to the Project. If you qualify, you can request an Access Key for http:BL.

Http:BL provides data back about the IP addresses of visitors to your website. Data is exchanged over the DNS system. You may query your local DNS server and receive a response back that indicates the type of visitor to your site, how threatening that visitor is, and how long it has been since the visitor has last been seen within the Project Honey Pot trap network.

Currently, you may take advantage of http:BL on your website if you use the Apache 2 Web Server. The Project Honey Pot team has developed mod_httpbl as a module for Apache 2. The module is published under the GPL (v.2) Open Source license. The module is currently in beta and you may request to be a beta tester.

Over time, we expect other applications will be developed around the http:BL data. To facilitate this, we have published an API. If you would like to integrate with http:BL, check out the http:BL API document.

Commercial and High-Traffic Uses of http:BL

In some instances, Project Honey Pot is willing to make the http:BL service available for commercial products such as firewalls, load balancers, or anti-spam appliances. If you are interested in using the http:BL data in this way, please contact us.

Website administrators that receive a high volume of traffic may prefer to download the http:BL DNS zone file rather than querying a remote DNS server. If your use of http:BL would cause a substantial amount of traffic to the http:BL system (e.g., you run a website in approximately the top-10,000 of Alexa's rankings), or if you'd simply prefer to have the http:BL DNS Zone file reside locally on your network, please contact us to discuss options.