My Short Life As An Unintentional Porn Spammer

Freerange writes "Mike Masnick wrote up his experience getting slammed by a somewhat new kind of spam attack that doesn't get much hype (yet?). A spammer spoofed his personal email address as the 'reply-to' for a batch of spam, with interesting results for Mike: "I can now answer the questions 'who replies to spam?' and (should anyone ever wonder) 'what are the hundreds of variations on bounced messages?'" From Politech."

Comments

Reverse spam really isn't that new...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers have been spoofing legit addresses for a while. I know a lot of times they'll simply use webmaster@somelegitdomain.com and basically cause that person a bunch of grief and headaches. Most users are too clueless to realize it's really not coming from that address.

Spam needs a technical solution.

[Sheetrock]

This adds more weight to my assessment of spam as being a technical problem with a need for a technical solution. Why are address spoofing and open mail relays still a problem after over a decade of spam-related problems?

Obviously, legislation isn't catching up and as evidenced by the junk fax law is useless when it does. Technical minds built the Internet, and I have little doubt that a solution could be found once we quit looking for the quick fix.

Everyone call your State Rep!

[Mustang Matt]

I gave Testimony to the Missouri House of Reps on Jan. 29th.

It's easy to get things in motion, everyone is too lazy to try though.

Re:and in other news

[Fluffy the Cat]

spam spam spam. if spam should be illegal, so should any form of unsolicited communication. that includes conversing to persons without their permission at the local pub.

Spam is grossly different to most other forms of unsolicited communication in one simple respect - the total cost to the recipiants is hugely larger than the total cost to the sender. This isn't true of (say) unsolicited email from an individual directly to you, unsolicted junk mail, unsolicited telephone calls or unsolicited personal conversation.

Re:3 little words

[ahrenritter]

Um.. those are three very pretty all caps words... but they don't have a lot to do with this article. They aren't talking about open-relay abuse here.. During the course of an SMTP transaction, there are two important identifying lines:
HELO
and
MAIL FROM:

Many SMTP servers will do some sort of verification on the HELO line, but very little can be done about the FROM line. You can't easily kill addresses that don't match the HELO domain because legitimate mail relays would be unable to forward your mail on then.

I can send you a piece of mail that will display bob.hope@whitehouse.gov as the from address. If Bob had that address, and people replied to the forged address, he'd be getting the blame for my spam.

It sucks.

Re:IQ Test

[gidds]

LOL!

I've never understood why people don't put "Press a key" instead. The intelligence-challenged can search out the `a' key, which will work, and the rest of us will know that all the others'll work too. Plus it's two characters shorter -- benefits all round!