🔍 Email Spy Pixel

A basic tracking pixel to track email opens.

Overview

Spy pixels, also commonly referred to as web beacons, are small artifacts implemented in applications to gather user information, which could include the User-Agent string, IP address, and if an email is opened etc. A basic method to collect this information is through the use of a 1x1 pixel with an embedded URL through a transparent PNG, GIF, JPG.

This project uses Python Flask to serve a static web page with a pixel.png included in the .../image directory. When a user opens an email with the embedded spy pixel, the User-Agent string, timestamp, and IP Address are logged to the spy_pixel_logs.txt file. This also allows for named images to do better email campaigning.

Deploy

To deploy this web application, create a basic server using a VPS / cloud provider of choice. Used Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS in this deployment.

The following services need to be installed on cloud host, use your favorite package manager (apt-get install):

• apache2
• libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3
• python-pip
• python 3.8+

This project assumes you are able to set up a basic Amazon EC2 instance. You can also host it on any other linux machine.

Step 1

Provision a t2.micro Amazon EC2 instance on Ubuntu 20.04.

💡 Make sure to generate or make note of the public/private key pair. A private key will be downloaded by default if you choose to generate one. Also ensure your security group (or cloud firewall) allows HTTP traffic (port 80).

Take note of the Public EC2 DNS domain name (image below).

Step 2

Log into the ubuntu instance with the private key using SSH. Alternatively, select the EC2 instance and use the online "Connect Profile."

ssh -i "my_private_key.pem" [email protected]

Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/collinsmc23/spy-pixel

Step 3

Change directories into the cd ~/spy-pixel/flaskapp.

In ~/spy-pixel/flaskapp/flaskapp.py set path_to_directory to match the absolute path to the directory you cloned the spy-pixel repo into. For example if it's in your home folder, you might set this: path_to_directory = "/home/ubuntu". If you don't do this, you'll see a lovely page that tells you that you did not in fact do it...

Link the the app directory to site-root defined apache configuration sudo ln -sT ~/spy-pixel/flaskapp /var/www/html/flaskapp.

💡 To check if this works use echo "Hello World!" > index.html. You should see this message when navigating to ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com.

Step 4

Add the following block below configuration to the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf. Make sure to fix the python path

WSGIDaemonProcess flaskapp threads=5 python-path=<PATH TO YOUR PYTHON SITE-PACKAGES DIRECTORY>
WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/html/flaskapp/flaskapp.wsgi
<Directory flaskapp>
    WSGIProcessGroup flaskapp
    WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Similar to this image but with the python path specified.

Image source: https://jqn.medium.com/deploy-a-flask-app-on-aws-ec2-1850ae4b0d41

Step 5

Restart the web service: sudo service apache2 restart.

Go to http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/image to see the 1x1 pixel.

Step 6

Add this 1x1 pixel as img src HTML to a web page or email.

<img src ="Http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/image" height=1 width=1>

You can add a sort of campaign ID by adding a /<ID> to the end of the link. This will display in the log.

<img src ="Http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/image/<ID>" height=1 width=1>

Step 7

Logging can be found at Http://ec2-publicDNS.amazonaws.com/logging

Spy Away (For Learning Purposes only)