Installation and Configuration
To install the software, unzip
the zipfile to a folder on your system.
The software comes with a number of configuration files, which appear in the
installation folder. You should make some changes to these files before running
the software in earnest; if all the instances of Jackpot were
identically-configured, then the software that spammers use to find open relays
could be adapted to fingerprint Jackpot honeypots, and exclude them. There are
two main ways to do this:
- Edit the file jackpot.properties. This is a
textfile containing a number of key/value pairs, where the value is a string
that Jackpot uses as a response to various different commands issued by the
spammer. There are comments in this file indicating what kinds of edits make
sense. In general, you cannot 'break' the software by editing this file (but
you could make render your honeypot very easy to distinguish from a real open
relay).
- If you know how to program in Java, even just a little bit, and you have a
Java Development Kit (JDK), you can create a Java class that will
automatically be loaded by Jackpot at startup, and will replace some of the
logic in the program, making it even harder for spammers to tell that they are
looking at Jackpot, rather than a conventional SMTP server. If you want to try
this, contact me.
If
you are running Win98, then you should use Jackpot.bat to launch Jackpot. You
can use this file also on WinNT or Win2K, but you might prefer to use the
shortcut jackpot.run. Right-click on this shortcut, edit the working folder to
point to the folder where you unzipped Jackpot files, and change the icon to
point to honey.ico in that folder.
Jackpot's console window will then have a
nice honeypot icon, instead of the default black-screen icon.
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