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Tracking Spam to the Source
cygnusx writes: "MSNBC is carrying a Wall Street Journal article on one reporter's attempts to track the spam she receives to the source. Armed with a few Hotmail and Yahoo accounts, reporter Stacy Forster actually responded to most of the barrage of spam she began to receive after a week or so. Not quite the best investigative jounalism ever seen, but still a good glimpse (or so I thought) at those who send us those unloved missives about "exciting business opportunities" and "millions of $$$ waiting"."
When I signed up for their ADSL service, I used a very odd username which I haven't used before, nor have I ever seen. I checked my email a day (after the account was made, not after I got DSL) later and guess what? Two email from Bellsouth, one from some porn company. I posted my findings to DSL reports, and got fired from my tech support job at Bellsouth DSL for that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Bloody hell, is there any way to filter out all posts with the phrase "beowulf cluster of these"? I'd even give up my Jon Katz filter if I could turn off these mindless attempts at humor. "All your base" died months ago, why the hell is this still popular?
Taco, Hemos, anyone, is there some way to stop seeing these damn things?
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
turn on "enable-bounce-cmd" in your prefs. Open the spam, hit "B", tippity-tap out the source e-mail address (or flex your gpm muscles if you're so inclined), and off it goes back to the sender; alternately, do your best to fudge a mailer daemon bounce. When they get the message, 9 times out of 10, they stop sending. Failing that, just redirect known bad domains (I do this with Yahoo and Hotmail because I don't know anybody who uses those accounts) into a spam folder; check it occasionally to make sure the signal-to-noise ratio is non-zero.
:)
It's not worth getting all hot and bothered over some "INCREDIBLE MONEY MAKING OPPORTUNITY" someone felt like telling you about.
On another note, check out somethingawful's pranks section under spam for Lowtax's take on the whole thing.
Want Linux games? HERE.
junkbuster blocked 15 images from loading in that one article.
---
Oregon
The popunder for the "World's Largest Casino." (NOT)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
The article says the FTC recommends that you forward all of your spam to uce@ftc.gov. I know I will be doing so from now on...
One spammer interviewed in the article says he sends out about 15,000 spam messages a day and gets 10-15 new customers out of that. So I guess the message about spam we send to these people is that's it's worth it.
It feels like we're kinda stuck - it's annoying and stupid, but spam is here to stay. That 1/1000 is a good enough target for these businesses, and e-mail addresses are so cheap to get they might as well go for it. The only thing I can think of is being extra careful to NEVER look into an e-mail that even looks like spam - don't go to the website, don't buy the product, even if it could be interesting.
I once asked a telemarketer if he hated his life, he said he did. I thought it was kinda funny that he admitted it straight out - it was proof that the underbelly world of cheap advertising is evil.
spacefem.com
... was to install Spambouncer, which is a large set of procmail filters.
/dev/null in the case it filters something it shouldn't.
Before installing it, I got ~20 spam messages a day. Now I get at most 1-2 a week. Spambouncer does come with very restrictive default settings, though. For example, you must specify if you want to receive email from free web mail services like Yahoo and Hotmail, otherwise it'll filter those out.
It also logs everything it does and has the option of sending blocked email to a file instead of
In my case the only inconvenience was it blocked legitimate email from Amazon.com and eBay -- these are filled with disclaimers and have HTML, which Spambouncer doesn't like to see. In any case, it's easy to mark those domains as safe and start receiving their email again.
Anyone else received an unsolicited email inviting them to participate in a Harris Poll for Microsoft ? Sort of a "how are we doing" type of thing ?
It took a little guts, but after 2nd and 3rd thoughts I reported it via spamcop.
Not sure if I'll take the poll anyway. I think it sucks that MS has me on their list. Maybe they scraped microsoft.public.???.
Software like TMDA implements this. When a mail comes from an known source, an automatic confirmation mail is sent by the script. If the sender acknowledges, his address will be added to the 'whitelist'. No more confirmation will be needed.
This is extremely efficient, and it basically reduces the SPAM actually delivered to your mailbox to zero.
Just don't forget to manually add mailing-lists you're subscribed to, to the 'whitelist'.
{{.sig}}
I want to know about one more part of the story.
She says she signed up a Yahoo account, bought one book from Borders.com and promptly received spam thereafter.
Sooooo.... if Borders _and_ Yahoo both say they there's no way the e-mail could have been sent out by either of them -- (and if the reporter is completely accurate about her sequence of events) -- how did the company get her e-mail address?
Either someone's lying, is mistaken, or her e-mail address was "created" through some sort of bruteforce e-mail address creation application.
Cheers,
Mike...
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
The FTC encourages consumers to forward unsolicited commercial spam to uce@ftc.gov.
Guess I have someone else than abuse.net to forward unsolicited spam to now..
I think we should have a server feature that is configurable from the client. The client would be able to tell the server that if a message has certain characteristics, the server should respond to the sender in the same way it would respond if the address didn't exist at all.
Any message that your client would filter into the trash, your client should be able to tell the server to bounce.
Perhaps we could also use the "plus convention" to allow users to effectively manage their own email address(es). Many servers are set up so that if my assigned email address is fred@foo.com, then fred+[anystring]@foo.com is still sent to fred. Tell your friends to address you as fred+friend@foo.com, and then have your client sort the "+friend" messages into a friends folder.
Why not be able to create a list of valid plus extensions in your client, which would then post them to the server? Why not be able to create your own rule for messages that arrive with no extension? You could instruct your client to instruct the server to accept them or to bounce them back to the sender as simply nonexistent addresses.
You could create an extension in your client and specify an expiration date. Your client informs the server. Then you post your email address publicly, a Usenet question perhaps, and your server would accept responses until the date you specify, and then bounce everything thereafter as spam.
With so many addresses expiring quickly and users able to get their servers to hide their non-expiring addresses from mail with certain characteristics, the spammers databases would become much less usable.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
...the reporter could have gotten more info if she didn't keep telling these people that she is a reporter?!?!
How's this for investigative journalism?
1. Locate Spammers
2. Call and explain to spammers that you are a reporter
3. Determine if spammer has hung up
4. If step 3 is yes, call spammer back and leave message
5. Repeat
Then when the spammer emails to it, track them down, file a large lawsuit for copyright infringment, tresspass to chattel, computer tresspass and fraud.
Bankrupt a few spammers, others may think twice before spamming
Fight Spammers!
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I've been sending SPAM to abuse/postmaster/uce@ftc.gov for months, but most ISPs will just terminate the account if they even bother.
We should be encouraging hackers to point their skills towards a noble goal: shutting down SPAMMER websites. SPAMMER's would take notice when their sites were hacked and redirected to Spamcop. And ISPs would really start to check accounts if their service became a transport for DDOS attacks against a SPAMMER.
Come on hackers it's easy. Create a hotmail account and post just once to USENET. I'm still getting SPAM 4 years after posting 1 message to USENET with a real address. Do something positive to the Internet community for a change. Get to work hacking those jerks' sites!
Select Message->Bounce to Sender, or Option-Command-B if you do this often...
I've been thinking about this...
Facts:
The only way to stop spammers is to make spamming unprofitable.
Their profit depends upon harvesting usable email lists, so there's a chance some idiot will buy something after reading their garbage.
Solution(?):
Dilute their mailing lists with so much garbage they'll only actually send out one or two emails to real addresses for every X thousand mails sent to fake addresses.
Method idea:
What if I put together a quick CGI to generate pages with fake text (just paragraphs full of random picks from a dictionary + punctuation) plus randomly created email addresses. Then linked to the chain of 1000's of fake pages from one of the real pages of my sites? What if I allowed anyone to use this tool for their own sites, to generate 1000's more, or made an online tool to generate pages and email them on to people to upload for their websites?
Anyone think this is a good idea? Obviously it's a trivial piece of scripting, but I think if major sites used something like this, it would seriously piss off a lot of these lowlifes...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
This is probably old news, but its just a thought.
What if it were required by law that every company must track WHERE and WHEN they obtained any e-mail address that they send bulk messages to. If you requested to be removed from their list "recursively" the offending company would have to notify its provider. Each company would have to notify any company they bought the address from that you want your information kept PRIVATE. The recursive notification would only go UP the chain. I'd love if it they had to notify everyone they sold it to as well, but this might not be practical. Each provider would send you a message as they removed you from their list. Each company would have to keep your e-mail address on a black list for a period of time you specify (such as "until hell freezes over") and not send you further mesasges until that time elapses.
You would have as evidence the date/time you were removed and would have grounds for damages in the event that someone repurchased your address from a provider or they didn't remove you.
Until then, I'll just continue to give my email address out as myname_companyimgivingitto@mydomain.com
So far, 99% of the spam is coming from myname_usenet@mydomain.com, which is about to be automatically filtered and deleted.
My dad was complaining bitterly about the volume of spam he was getting as a result of signing up to get a online greeting card (no I don't remember which site) since he's on a dialup account with fixed number of free hours each month. Downloading and deleting the spam effectively ate into his hours. A quick installation of Mailwasher (which serves to send messages back marking it as undeliverable) served to quiet him afterwards since he now feels like he's doing something to stop it.
What I think I might want to check is to see if it can't also directly forward the original email to that ftc mail address...
A year or two ago I came to the conclusion that you cannot stop all the spammers using filters. You can use any filtering program you want, but either you going to loose some e-mail or some spam will get though (or both). You can use fake e-mail addresses but many sites now-days check by sending you a confirmation e-mail that requires you to do something with information you get in the e-mail. But what you CAN do is control how they get your e-mail address in the first place.
/dev/null's email coming into that account.
;-).
Here is my easy method to track the bastard that sold your address. All you need is your own domain and control over the e-mail server - as many of my fellow geeks do.
Using my domain - I created an account for dealing with spam. I then created an alias which will put all e-mails without a specific mailbox into that account. (for example - the qmail/vmailmgr allows you to create "+" alias as such catch-all address)
Now comes the fun part- every time I need to use my e-mail in public - I make up an e-mail address that makes it easy to figure out where I used it. To make sure I do not create a real mailbox with same name - I use a specific prefix (like ns- for no spam) to make all of those e-mail addresses stand out (example - when signing up for e-bay, I sign up with ns-ebay@mydomain.com. Now when that spam arrives I can find out which e-mail address it is destined to - and which place it came from.
The last part of this comes after a while. Eventually some addresses start getting too much spam and you seem to end up where you started. No problem. I create a new alias that bounces or
If I find that I gave out an address to a trustworthy source, I can even create an alias to go to my main mailbox.
Of course, if you go to a source that is guaranteed to leak your address to spammers, no point to even bother with all this - that's what the free webmail accounts are for
The interesting part of all this is that to my own surprise I find that most sites are pretty good at keeping your privacy when you sign up. So far the biggest culprits were postings on USENET (well, duh!) and ebay - but e-bay were all from massmailings by people I bought from and they were good at removing my address when asked to.
Hope this helps.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
I use procmail to filter out email from anyone not in my address book to a different account. That way I can check the spam account once a day, and won't be bothered the rest of the time.
.*myisp.com
.*networksolutions.com
.*otherimportantdomains
I export the email addresses in my address book to a file which I FTP to my server. Here is the procmail recipe I use on the server:
-------
SHELL=/bin/sh
FROM=`formail -rzxTo:`
:0
* ! $FROM ??
* ! $FROM ??
* ! $FROM ??
* $ ! ? cat emaillist.txt | fgrep -iqs "$FROM"
! spam@account.com
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I followed the link to the story, and got an idiotic popup spam for some online casino.
You could do what I do -- go into your prefs and mark all 'funny' comments as -6. It sounds extreme, and at first I felt like I was missing something by not having funny comments. But then every time I turned it off, I could just feel brain cells dying.
YMMV, though.
The heck with contacting the ISP, I want it to interface with those secret laser satellites and vapourize the spamming computer. They've got the target icon on eMailTrackerPro already. Now THAT would be satisfaction.
People say things "off the record" all the time.
If reports print things without unveiling the fact that they're a reporter, it's mostly just unethical journalism, which can actually get you in trouble - because since you didn't announce that you were doing an interview, you don't have legal proof that the guy said everything (and agrees with eveyrthing) he said. If that stuff is bad stuff, he can sue you for libel.
If you have your own domain name, simply use abuse@yourdomainnamehere.com as your primary e-mail address and you'll never be spammed. After 3 years I am still waiting for my first spam
Once I got a spam from someone claiming to be my cousin Jimmy. He said that he had found a place that would host our web site for free. My plan was to find the sender and arrange a meeting and when it wasn't the real "Jimmy" to freak out and ask WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH JIMMY?!?!?! I sent "Jimmy" an email saying it was good to hear from him, and that I sometimes still felt guilty about what we did to that guy up at the lake (fiction). My message to Jimmy just bounced, which made me wonder what the heck the reason was for this spam. I was prepared to send them real $$$ just to have my little joke.
I simply use an email client that will render the contents in text-only mode.
On linux I use Evolution (setting Message Display to "Show Email Source") and on Windows I use Agent (or FreeAgent).
Agent is a bit more polished in that it displays an icon in place of the HTML that you can click to launch you favorite browser.
While most filtering programs and package mentioned here are for the individual user, or one that has their own mail server, what would you suggest for ISPs to use?
Its not possible to do the 'deny all, allow from a list' at the root level as you have no idea what customers will want to allow.
RBL helps some of course, but not much.
Subject filters help abit too but only for words you Know will be in spam, and sometimes it needs to be multiple words which means a spammer can rearange the subject and it will still get past.
The ISP I work for has been in business for about 7 years now under the same domain name, and has been dictonary scanned/spammed so even when adding a new account chances are someone has been sending spam to that address for alot time before it existed.
Blocking spam by the relay server used is not possible. I get over 500 spams a day to the normal administration addresses (staff hostmaster postmaster etc) and generally 475 of them are different servers. It would not be possible to filter them all, and even so the chances of the relay server being used a second time appears very low.
Most of the 'server-wide' filter programs are designed to try and not block ligit email.
Unfortunatly this means it blocks very little spam in the process.
Would anyone know of any solutions we havent thought of?
There's a column in today's Washington Post on spam:
I arrive at my office, uncap my coffee, unwrap my bagel, open my e-mail and face the first searing public policy question of the day: "Do you want to watch teens make their first porn video?"
It's called "The Great American Spam Attack", by Ellen Goodman.
Evolution doesn't load external images in HTML mail by default. You have to ask it to if you want, one by one (View -> Display Message -> Load Images)
However, such programs generate incredible amounts of traffic - the money generated far exceeds the bad publicity and attention the occasionally poorly targeted email generates.
Sorry this is long -- please bear with me.
We need to realize or accept these things:
1. We absolutely cannot directly control the behavior of all the spammers. No law is going to stop all of them from sending spam. No law enforcement agency is going to search all of them out and prosecute all of them. No punitive action (legal or otherwise) by a group of users is going to dissuade all of them. And if we don't stop all of them, there will still be spam in our mailboxes. We can safely give up on this kind of thing.
2. The problem with spam is not that they send it, but that we receive it and it's in our faces when we want to read our real email, and it's annoying to have to deal with it. So we need to stop worrying about the sending of the spam. We have to handle it at the receiving end (our end).
3. The spammers are will continue to be motivated to send spam because it works often enough to be profitable for them.
4. Inbound mail filtering on addresses or message content will never go far enough. Some spam (new junk from new sources) will continue to get through, and the spammers will be encouraged enough to continue.
Solving the problem means making a couple of changes -- one fundamental (about the way we think about email) and one sweeping (across as many email systems as possible):
1. The fundamental part -- we must change the way we think about accepting email from unidentified senders. It is the acceptance of mail from unverified sources that allows spam to work at all.
2. The sweeping-change part -- we need to implement (or lobby for) verified-sender mail delivery systems everywhere, and get it to be the default delivery mechanism for new accounts. These are the kind of systems (like TMDA) that use whitelists to allow mail to be delivered, with all other inbound mail (except the blacklist) gets an auto-response with a code - the sender is asked to reply to the auto-response in order to get their original mail delivered. Responders are added to the whitelist. People will get used to the verification process -- it isn't terribly burdensome.
Anyway, if no response comes back in X days, the message may be discarded, optionally adding the sender's address to a blacklist.
This kind of delivery system stops spam because of the very nature of spam -- the sender never looks at replies to his spam. Think about it.
It isn't necessary to use TMDA -- it's just one example of this kind of system. I ended up writing my own system with scripts and procmail. I'm down from 30-40 spams per day to zero, and my email is usable again.
If we do this across the board and make it the default condition for new accounts, spam will stop working for those who use it. When the response rate drops to zero, they'll quit spending money on it.
This does not address the issue of the cost of receiving the spam (for those who pay by the byte), but if we can make it all dry up and go away by making it stop working, that problem would solve itself.
Disclaimer: this is all opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary.
TyZone
When making web pages, I like to make people's emails on the page a a small .png file instead of text with no mailto: link. This prevents that these programs can pick it up.
It also prevents that blind people using a speech reader can pick it up, which may be a violation of your jurisdiction's disability code.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just hope that ISP isn't 'prserv.net'. I've been getting regular spam from their same set of Texas dialup lines, from the same spammer, for the last 3-4 months, despite forwarding to "abuse@prserv.net" AND a couple of phone calls...
At least reporting to the ISP's where the abusive bastard hosts his magic "enlarge your penis" pills (and a variety of other scams) and getting him kicked off has caused him to obfuscate his URL so badly in recent spams that I can't figure out how to view the advertisements even if I TRY...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Lets take all of our spams on a daily basis and put 'em into a large database for analysis, and output cool statistics. Would Larry Ellison like to help with this one?
Then parhaps, the FTC/FBI could use the data as a tool for investigation in order to link paterns in the database to their respective spamlords.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
The idea is to set you free to surf/sign up at will and make it easier to not get spam than it is to get spam.
We had a problem, we allowed people to send you an sms email to your phone at phonenumber@company.com. Normal service, people wanted to get email'ed alerts for stocks, messages from the wife/gf etc. To fight spam we put up message que that checks to see if the sender is sending over 10 emails to different accounts. It filters out most spam. We did have to tweak settings for people who do dispatch services to employees.
The other method we did, we added a random 5 digit number to a persons phone number. So if your phone number was 2025551212 it would be 2025551212-01234. This blocked all brute force spam techniques. The customer knew what thier subscriber id was, and it was safe from prying eyes.
Im tired of spam, using the same email address for over 6 years, my daily spam count is over 100. Spam and tele-marketers are the worst.
-
The worst thing about Europe is that you can't go out in the middle of the night and get a Slurpee. - Tellis Frank
The least you can do is cost the spammer their account. Depending on the spams contents I...
Traceroute the last reliable IP of the sending email address. Know your mail gateways and take the IP address it received the mail from, traceroute it and report to abuse@[someisp].[ext]. If seems unreputable, cc their isp.
Visit the web page. Do it. This is to find out if there's a redirect in place. http://[somefreewebhost].com/[directory] redirects to http://[scumballspammer].com/ . Traceroute and report the site it redirected you to to the appropriate ISP. Least it will do is annoy the sysadmin, and we know how sysadmins can be. Best case is they lose their site, any money put toward it, and pay a penalty fee.
If the web page sends you somewhere to order, visit it, traceroute it, and report. (Same reasons as above.)
In the case of javascript encoded html, it's easy to rewrite. Look for the document.write( xxx ); statement and change it to document.write( "<form><textarea>" + xxx + "</textarea>" ); . Repeat as necessary. Follow steps above.
I wrote something vaguely similar a while back. A lawyer friend of mine tells me the contract won't work, since there is no "consideration" involved.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Normally, spammers use bogus return addresses, right?
So how about this: every time my computer receives an email, it initiates a connection to the sender and tries to send a reply message. If the sender's server accepts the email address, close the connection (i.e. cancel the message before it's finished). If the server rejects the email address, you know the return address is invalid, so you can throw away the message (or filter it into a different box).
Of course, spammers might start to make the return addresses random (but valid) return addresses at yahoo, etc. - but that will just get Yahoo very, very mad, and they'll track down and sue the spammers.
Probably never gonna happen, but I've never heard that particular idea before...
First and foremost, the reason spam isn't stopping at all is because it IS legal. If it's not legal, you at least have the power to go after spammers and the ISP's who harbor them. In order for spammers to make money, there has to be a way of contacting the spammer - PO Box, 800 number, etc. so you Will be able to find them and procecute them. Hell, we would probably have spammer bounty hunters that will take a cut of the fine for doing this for you...
Your solution fails on a number of accounts.
First, it requires that you dump the current standard and replace it with another. OK, how many years are you going to give people to upgrade all their mail software, hardware devices, firewalls, etc. before the old protocol stops working? How many more years of SPAM will we have to put up with before that happens? Considering how superior IPv6 is, why are we still on IPv4? Even though we have digital TV (in the US), we still broadcast analog too, and will for a while. Protocols like this can't be changed overnight.
Second, the current system allows for offline and batch delivery. EMail makes it's way through the internet even though mail servers and networks go down periodically. With a system that requires a "pick up", you then have to deal with network / server outages, and you lose the ability to batch.
Mailing lists batch delivery, by the way. If there are 500 AOL users subscribed to a list, only ONE copy is sent to the AOL servers. Your system would require 500x the bandwidth and have much higher server overhead. I've run mailing lists for MANY years with tens of thousands of users. I don't have any problems with them as I know what the hell I'm doing, and use decent mailing list software (with heavy customizations....)
Third, when you do crypto verifications, you need an authority elsewise you can be spoofed (man in the middle attacks, etc.). Anyone wanna have to buy a $150 verisign cert per email address? They won't be free you can bet your bottom on that.
Spam is not just a security problem. It's a social problem. Not all laws are bad - you KNOW there are going to be a couple new laws that will go a long way towards preventing future Enron problems for example.
I don't know why she says mail-order diplomas are worthless. My cousin landed a great job as a financial analyst at an energy trading company called Enron with just such a diploma.
Table-ized A.I.
I used "+friend" as an example, but you can see that, in essence, it's a password. For that reason, people could make it as easy or as convoluted as they like, so there would be billions of possibilities per email address.
Lets just take the case where they use a 10,000 word dictionary containing the most common words in the most common languages plus the most common names (given names and surnames) plus the most populous place names.
Even that system could be fooled by just using "+bluebanana" or the like. But let's suppose it were used anyway to catch as many as it could.
A 20 million name spam database (typical) times 1000 tries, lets say, before they get a hit, means they'd have to send 20 BILLION messages just to recover the number of working addresses they currently have.
If you want to talk about cost, NO ISP is going to let you send 1000 times as many emails for the same price. Whatever it costs you is likely to be way more than the return you can expect from the one in a million response rate (1/1000 estimated further reduced by a factor of 1000 or more).
And if spammers reach you eventually, you just resort to ever more obscure plus extensions, and for your highest priority people, immediate family for example, you just rotate them as often as necessary.
If we had this system, someone could build an analog of "spread spectrum" among participating clusters of friendly clients, where they coordinate the switches in email address extensions amongst themselves without human intervention, using long random sequences that humans wouldn't even need to remember.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The only difference between the accounts is that the one she divulged to Borders received more spam; therefore Borders sold her address
You're missing part of it.
She says "I created email accounts on hotmail and yahoo, and used one to order from borders.com"
Then she says yahoo and borders don't sell email addresses. (Hotmail is conspicuously absent from this statement.)
What she didn't say is WHICH email service she used for this account. Dollars to donuts it was hotmail.
I assume that hotmail is hacked daily, just to harvest the email addresses.
I think you can create a hotmail account, do NOTHING with it, come back in a week, and read your spam.
Whenever I have to give my adress to a website where I think there is even the slightest possibility that a spammer could get my e-mail address I merely give them a dummy spam account I have set up. I never get any spam in my normal mailbox and just hop over to the spam box every once in a while and look for any legit messages.
I stole this Sig
Notice the hotmail account guys who was tricked by the MSN Messanger setup talking about "We never gave our mails, not even using it but when we checked not to get it suspended , we figured there are 100 spams!"?
A guy/gal using Hotmail gets heavily advertised to use and install MSN Messanger and some does it just to have a online mail checker for hotmail.
Now the freaky part begins... http://news.com.com/2100-1001-833154.html
Yes... With a not-so-advanced 133t jscript tactics, they can harvest your mail AND the mails of others unless they use a nickname. I don't see any reason like 90% of people would change their know Hotmail adresses to nicknames.
More interestingly CNET reporter tries to say (I congratulated him for breaking that story btw) "It is not so serious". YES it is serious!
For months I was telling my friends I am not using MSN messanger because I believe spammers/harvesters found a way to get my MSN signon name and spamming me. They called me paranoid, anti-ms but recent days they admitted "We don't know how too but there must be a way and we are getting spams"
Can anyone tell me how that glitch isn't serious?
Am I the only one who sees the irony in this post's moderation?
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This point has been made before, but needs to be reiterated, where did the spammer get the e-mail address from? Remember the author said that she only used the e-mail address to buy a book from borders. Did borders, yahoo or hotmail(especially hotmail) violate their own privacy policies? If we look at common SPAM sources such as pm0.net, flowgo et al you will find that they violate their own privacy policies all the time. Published policies state that you will be removed from any list (try it sometime, good luck) the truth is a lot different. Perhaps the spammers used a dictionary attack.
Those of us in the trenches are seeing more and more of this. A spammer picks a domain and then starts sending mail to that domain, starting at 11111@foo.com working their way up to zzzzzzzzzz@foo.com. They usually bounce it off from an open relay or the originating source is from China. (Jesus I get crap loads of viruses from china, spam from china and network probes every f**king day from China, just aWTF is up with that?) So my mail server has to handle thousands of bounces. Add to that the return address is often faked. The bounce then bounces, adding more load to my server, and load to the innocent victims server (like all the faked addresses from domains like AMERICA.COM or CNN.COM) If the IP is in a common RBL I at least have a small chance of catching it. I've taken to blocking the IP that contacts my mail server with any double bounce for a period of 4 hours. This alone has reduced server load by several percent.
Almost every on-line policy I have ever seen has the little line added that says "We reserve the right to change this without noticve, and without informing you" in effect. I wonder if borders, yahoo or hotmail changed their policy and just didn't inform us.
I say the only way to get spammers back its to make them pay. If they give you an 800 number, call up and give them some information "Hello, recording device, this is Jack Meoff at 6969 killspam lane, yes I'd like some information on your service, my number is (Give non 800 number from other spam). IF enough people do that then it will be cost prohibitive for them. Keep talking until recorder hangs up (more expensive, make the use 800 numbers not profitable and real phone numbers can be easier to track, at least in the US)
Here is a little fantasy from someone that has to defend against these morons. Nothing like getting 50,000 e-mails to a domain that only has 2k accounts on it. My favorite solution, of course, I'm not endorsing this or suggesting you do it, but with a real phone number and a real address a baseball bat and 2 friends is the best answer to the spam solution.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
This is definately a "good enough" style filter, and not intended to catch every theoretical variation of spam and good (but spam-like) messages. I find that it is rarely wrong (2 misrouted messages in 4 years).
Here is a summary of my filters, in order of execution;
Mark OK and move to a non-Spam folder:
Move to Spam folder:
Move to Likely Spam folder:
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
"1. If directly to or from me/known person/known list."
Notes:
This catches the rare case where a stranger replies to a message where my address is masked but that is directed to someone I know. This does not catch the case where all addresses are masked (this has happened once).
In all examples, "To" means cc, bc, or to.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
But the techique works. Every time they send a mail, they provide information about themselves, that info can be used to identify and bounce spam to real addresses.
I use From: because it's simple and gets most of the spam, other information from the headers can also be pulled out by formail and used to identify incoming spam. Reply-To: for instance may also be useful.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
http://razor.sourceforge.net/
It should fit right in with Spamido: http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You live in Oregon, in the 110th and SE Stark area?! As a resident of Eugene, I'd have to say you must live in Portland. Only a PDX resident would be so brash as to write off the possibility that there are other cities in Oregon. First you steal our area code, now you've stolen the whole state!
Geez - you only make up half the population up there...
NOTE: I'm just joshin'...
Culture is more than commerce
It was an oversite I neglected to include the small town in the Northwest part of the state where I used to live. Sorry. Actualy I grew up in Redmond and I no longer live in Oregon. I moved to a lower tax state. It's funny to hear the revenue problems the state has while being one of the higher taxed states. Maybe they want to tax like California and not like Idaho or Washington.
The truth shall set you free!