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DSLReports Study: 8 Hours 'til the Spam Hits

Posted by timothy on from the upcoming-spam-death-of-the-universe dept.

Masem writes: "In a rather interesting study at DSLReports, it was observed that email addresses published on a web site recieved spam within 8 hours of being posted, showing how aggressive the harvesters are working. In particular, a special link was set up on the main page that by following the link, the site generated an email address that was trackable to the IP that called the link, and not published anywhere else at any time. In the specific case, in only 8 hours after the email address was created, it had recieved spam; since that time about 9 months ago, it's gotten around 100 pieces. Given the time and source of most of the emails, the authors believe that they've simply got someone at one end of a home broadband pipeline using open relay mail servers, and most likely being paid to redistribute spam on the email addresses they harvest."

6 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. That's nothing... by gUmbi · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's the average length of time between a slashdot posting and the subsequent DoS attack on the linked site?

    Jason.

  2. Spammed by the best by reparteeist · · Score: 3, Funny

    Damn that Bernard Shifman! Will he never learn?

    --
    If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait, he does.
  3. telemarketers by Beowulf_Boy · · Score: 3, Funny

    I rarely ever got telemarketing calls.
    Last week I applied for a telemarketing job.
    Within hours I started getting calls, and I've gotten 5 a day since.

  4. Re:To Spammer, please Harvest these addresses: by TRoLLaXeR · · Score: 3, Funny
    Years ago, I had been using bob@bob.com as a generic email address to enter whenever I feared receiving spam. As I recently discovered, there really is a bob@bob.com. (The address was formerly owned by someone at Microsoft, if I recall correctly.)

    I'm sorry, Bob. So very, very sorry.

  5. Re:To Spammer, please Harvest these addresses: by Roundeye · · Score: 4, Funny
    I always use real addresses, just those of the people I think more likely to be interested in cheap Viagra, weight loss, and 12-year old girls:
    hotline@mpaa.org and cdreward@riaa.org.

    --
    "Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
  6. One guy? by blair1q · · Score: 5, Funny

    One guy is the source of all the spam on the Internet?

    I say we've found a perfect target for testing that AC-130 Death Ray.

    --Blair