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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."
I experienced this five years ago and a group of sysadmins helped me track the guy back to his ISP and we turned the info over to the FBI as identity theft. We were told that my experience did not meet the threshold for them to investigate further ($5000 in damages). Worse, the ISP didn't have a code of conduct prohibiting this type of thing...
Sucks when it happens, but isn't new.
Probably the same idiot in Minnesota:(
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
The place I work (Productive Data Corporation) gets tons of bounced spams and replies to spams every day. Our domain is productive.com so any email to whatever (at) productive.com comes back to the admin email accounts. As you can probably guess there's quite a few spammers that use productive.com as reply-to. We have to constantly update our spam blockers to weed out all the real emails from the spam =/
Why not just put some bogus made-up address there?
Are the spammers just trying to cause as much chaos and unpleasantness for as many peoples as is humanly possible?
I'm in the Northwest US. The spam sent with my name came from Bermuda, according to the headers. I got complaints and a reply that seemed to be a death threat. The death threat came from Russia. Email to its return address came back as undeliverable. Talking to my ISP, they said that there is really not much that can be done about this unless I wanted to change my email address. I do business there, so I can't.
Really, the only way to combat this kind of identiy fraud is with PGP. It would be ideal if every mail-program out there supported PGP.
-- bartman
Curiously, I almost never get anyone writing to me complaining about the spam. That used to happen, but I think most folks have figured out not to reply. I also don't seem to have been blacklisted anywhere (faughnan.com); the blacklist maintainers are apparently smart enough not to be fooled by spoofed fields.
Why did they pick me? I think they like to take addresses that are present in the registrar databases. Or maybe they picked me because I complained about spam and write about ways to stop it (not that hard really, we just need to authenticate the sending service rather than the harder task of authenticating the sender).
In any event, sadly this is old news. Good to know it's starting to make its way into the public consciousness though.
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
Has the rapid growth of the Internet of the last few years caused it to reach the status of an immovable object?
IPv6, which includes security, ummm, mechanisms that could be utilized to curtail spoofing, some forms of DDOS and net abuses in general, but rolling it out seems too be gracial.
New RFC's could be authored that extend, modify or replace those upon which our present mail server's are based, but would... could anyone get them pushed through? Or is the Internet infrastructure so massive that any major advances in concept run smack into the issue of interoperability?
I don't know if this actually works for anybody trying the spam technique, as I'd hope most people getting these messages would either be too smart to fall for it or too afraid of the stock market to set up and manage their own account.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The new one i've run into recently is they use some kinda script so that the reply-to address in my address....which makes fintering really easy becuase how often do I send mail from my account TO the same account. However I could see some stuipd user getting very confused. :)
Holy crap the email she got! Emails came from people all over the world. An incredibly rare number of them included clothing and were simply introductions. Most of them included an attached nude picture of (I assume) themself (either that or there is a cast of nude pictures of incredibly ugly people floating around somewhere). Some of them demonstrated their sexual experiences with animals. But every single one of them seriously pursuing some sort of sexual relationship with someone that
This whole experience turned my wife off of the internet for a long time.
I was able to track down the original post to alt.bestiality.whatever it was, and tracked it to a posting through deja news. (This was about 5 years ago). But ironically, there was nothing in that post that included "go to this website" or anything like that. The only contact information in it was my wife's email address. At the time, I assumed that the person who did this wanted us to change email addresses so he/she could have the one that we had (which was simply my wife's first name@iname.com).
After tracking it down I sent deja the information and asked them to pursue it. And I changed my wife's email address. We have our own domain now. BUT I still, occasionally login to the iname.com account and empty it. I want that account to stay active forever so that whoever tried this doesn't win.
What would you do if this happened to you? What are the defenses for this kind of thing? The email that came in wasn't spam. It was real email from real people who had real mailboxes. How do you prevent this kind of thing? So most of the antispam techniques that I know of wouldn't have worked. Additionally, we occasionally get emails w/attachments from friends who want to show us pictures of their kids. So blocking all attachments won't work. What should be done?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
...if it's a legit company who has someone who has a person actually reading the replies.
This is a letter I sent off to a company who offered me ways to enlarge my breasts. Being male and having no desire for hooters I felt obliged to reply.
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Do you people simply not bother to see to whom this message is going to? Do you not bother to do market research to see if I'm even going to be able to use the product? I am a man. I have a penis and not breasts. I am a guy, a bloke packing a "willie", a "johnson", "meat and two veg", a "one-eyed trouser snake", a "little fellow", a thingie, the "outy" parts to match up with the "inny" bits of the people to whom you should be sending this spam to and not me and my "Collection of dangly bits".
To put it simply people..."A DICK"
I have no interest in your product for the enlargement of breasts and request that you remove me from your list.
Thank You,
[name removed]
BTW: I'm also happy with the size of my naughty bits and request that you not send me information on that product should you offer that as well.
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To which I actually got this as a response:
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ROFL
Sir we are deeply sorry that you have recieved this advertisment and we are taking you off our contact list. We thank you for your polite and amusing letter.
Again sorry for the inconvience
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That was in August and to this day I have not seen any messages offering to give me "Huge...tracts of Land" since that date.
Sometimes it pays to answer a spam
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
This happened to my wife recently - She was suprised (to say the least) to be getting hundreds of bounces back from a spam.
If it had been porn I would have looked into the possiblity of filing a defamation of character lawsuit. It was in your case and if it was written in the first person singular ( "come see me nekkid...") and had *you* as the reply-to I'd imagine you'd have an excellent chance of winning such a case - it would certainly be worth talking to a lawyer about.
A spammer forges the wrong domain into a batch of spam, and the victim strikes back.
Sometimes spammers do this just by putting whatever domain in. Other times this is done deliberately as a means of attacking someone.
The term Joe-Job got it's name originally from Joes.com when a spammer decided to get revenge in this fashion. Information can be found here:
Spam Attack!
I can say from having had this done to me, it absolutely sucks. It creates a huge mess that takes weeks to clean up, plus the joy of dealing with people who decide to attack you for something you didn't/would never do. If I were to ever get my hands on those responsible....
Unfortunately, the problem with tracking down those responsible for this dispicable act is the same one with tracking spammers down in general. It is time consuming, costly and may not yield a desireable result.
If you want to see more on this, just Google Search for "Joe-Job"
It is good to bust/report spammers, but when you do, look at the spam and the site being spamvertized. You might have received a joe-job email and by reporting them, you're playing into the spammer's hands.
If you ever get joe-jobbed, I would say one defense on the web is to change your page to one similar to the "Spam Attack" page I reference above.
I tried to find where they were coming from, some of the bounces were more informative than others... The originating IP ended up being someone(intentionally or unintentionally) running an SMTP proxy server... And the IP was out in the middle of nowhere... (Came back to a B-class set of addresses... Not much help in tracking down a network admin...)
Some of the bounces had the actual message... Which were linking people to a site which in turn asked them to buy something (saying that their order page was secure when it wasn't)... I tracked down who had registered the domain (the admin and billing contacts...) addresses ended up being in China (domain was cnmailads.com)... Sent email, no response... I set up procmail to redirect the hundreds of bounces to them, plus I had some simple spam filters, and redirected all of my spam to them as well...
The order page contained a form that had an email address for where the orders were really going... I made my own personal copy of the form, and began sending megs of data through... Entering bogus info to corrupt any real entries (who would order this crap over the Net from a website in China??? Who knows...) Email address was a yahoo account, which it didn't take long for me to fill it up... All added the yahoo address to my procmail redirector as well...
I went to a couple of spammy sites (cooldeals.com or something like that)... Signed them up to receive all sorts of valuable emails... Signed them up for some mailing lists too... Easy to sign up, and pain to get off of...
It had been going on for about a week before I started this, and stopped after about 2 days... Checked back to the link that was sent and the site was gone... Probably moving on to the next sucker email address and site...
Platform independent bug tracking software
It was kind of a cross between usenet and standard email. When you "sent" an email, it was in reality uploaded to your message store (the idea of the inbox was removed). Then notifications were sent to each person that a message was in the To field. That meant that for instance you could edit messages after they were sent, you could bring people in on threaded conversations half way through preserving the threading and so on. It also meant the attachment limit was decided by the senders account, not the receivers. Want to send a 200mb video to your hotmail using friend? No problem.
One of the features of this system was that key signing was built in from the start. That meant, you could opt to trust certain "roots", probably international ISPs. If you wanted to setup a newMail server, you'd have to get your hosting ISP to sign it for you, probably requiring a contract to be signed saying you'd shut down any abusive accounts etc.
Mailing lists were dealt with specially, I've never been happy with the way they currently work.
Combined with send limits (how often do you email >100 people?), that meant that spam could be cut down quite significantly. In particular, because it could be shut off at the source, if a spammer did somehow manage to spam lots of people at once, all it'd take is one report and the email would magically disappear from peoples message stores, before they'd even seen it in some cases. If the spammers were running their own servers, revoking their certs would do a similar trick.
It wouldn't eliminate spam of course, that's not possible. Smart enough people will figure out ways around it. However, having accountability built in from the start would help curb the situation a lot.
Originally I was going to write the client as a commercial app, but make the protocols open (with a non-commercial free license available). However, I ended up working on autopackage instead, so I never got around to it. If somebody thinks it'd be cool, contact me and I'll fill you in.
It's funny people are modding you down cuz you mentioned MS.
I agree with you, and these morons are missing the point. The email protocol is fucked, millions could be saved if we moved to something new. And it is no secret that MS and a few other major companies could have the power to do it.
Anyways, I gave you a few extra points. The question should be how. And, how on earth can we enforce the destruction of today's email protocol while introducing another? How can we even stop spam with a new one?
Ditto.
The easiest way of me getting data (Word docs, code, etc) to and from a place of business where I'm freelancing and my home is by emailing the files from one web-based email address to that same email address.
Because the data is being sent from and to the same server, there's no chance that the email won't be delivered. So, you know that (barring a major server or internet breakdown) your data will be there waiting for you at the other end - no need to carry around any media at all.
It can even be made practically secure - just zip up your files and attach a password to the transmitted zip file.
Also, should you get side-tracked and not make it home (eg, if you get lucky and score, despite being a geek) then you don't have to worry about carting around a floppy disk or CD-R all day, or worry about losing it (leaving it at her place).
Temporary online storage like this works wonders.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I have had to deal with this same problem off and on.
Someone who does not like the idea of my operation of a website critical
of our company forges e-mails with my E-mail Address.
Instead of porn or spam this person includes Virus files.
Same said person also sends me 2 or 3 Klez infected e-mails everyday.
http://www.Slaveway.com
Fun reply to your last bit, I've got an Earthlink DSL account, which comes with an email address that I've had for about 2.5 years now. I've never used the thing to send mail ever. I had to log in to it to get something from Earthlink a while back, to find about 8 MB of spam on an account that has never been posted anywhere, never been used to send email, never known by anybody but Earthlink and myself, and my username isn't so common that people should be just guessing to send email there, at least not 8 MB of spam much.
I figure it isn't my space so I'll let Earthlink deal with it. They're probably the ones who sold me out in the first place.
If not now, when?
More often than you might think. This is how a lot of mail systems support people like me who like to keep a copy of everything they have sent.
I do wish that more of the spam filtering people would take notice of these tactics however. Quite a few of the more clueless ones have all sorts of hack-back features that can end up slamming innocent people.
The only unusual thing in this case is that it was porn. The porn senders tend to be rather more discrete than most since they know that if there is an FBI type investigation they are sure to make examples of porno senders first. This tactic tends to be more common amongst the con-artists that the FBI are completely uninterested in prosecuting.
One of the big problems is that there is no agency that has an analogous operation to the mail-inspectors role in the post office. In theory this is wire fraud but the wire fraud investigators tend to be busy dealing with cases with a few really big transactions. They are much less interested in a case where the amounts are $30 or so, even though the totals might be millions.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
But that isn't the most disgusting part about it. All the bounced addresses were coming from one particular domain, which happens to be the domain my parents are on so I really don't want my email address blacklisted from their servers. Nor do I want my account closed by Yahoo, as I've had the account for a long time. Since I don't want this, and I hate spam as much as the next guy, I decided that I should send that domain owner's operators, which happen to be an ISP, an email message explaining what was going on and that if they could retrieve the headers from my message they'd have another relay they should add to their list to block.
On to the disgusting part. I get a message back telling me that I have a virus. A virus of all things, sending spam, to alphabetical lists of people on a single domain. Right. I try again, explaining the situation in detail so they can see what's going on. I include the bounce message, etc. They tell me they'll take care of it in that sort of message you know means they'll delete any correspondence we've had to this point and ignore it. Luckily enough I haven't gotten any more such signs that my email address is being forged, but I'm still put out that the people who should care, because it's their bandwidth and customers, first insulted me and then told me in so many words to bugger off.
If not now, when?
My sweetie got Joe-Jobbed a couple of weeks ago. 20K bounces over the course of the day. Thankfully, the payload of the spam was only two lines of text, containing a URL to a (non-existent) pr0n site. So the bounce messages were comparatively short. A cursory look at the headers in the bounces suggested that the attacker -- 'spammer' is too genteel a term for this -- was using a constellation of open relays to spread the stuff.
She came into my office, saying, "Make it stop!" Sadly, there turns out to be little one can do to stop it. The emails were coming from thousands of different legitimate sites, all serving a legitimate bounce to an illegitimate spam. It was very distressing for her. Fortunately, the attack stopped, and things settled down after about 24 hours.
I wrote up the experience on Kuro5hin. Feel free to have a look.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I had the UK national radio station Classic FM hijack my domain and use it to send a Valentines day spam message (this was last year). Again, the only way I found out was when all the spam came bouncing back to me. I wrote to the MD of the station, and did get a personal reply, apologising and claiming their web developer had made a "mistake". I asked for compensation and didn't get it though. I also got plenty of out of office auto replies, plenty with name, addresses and telephone numbers. The biggest number of bouncing emails came from Hotmail, Yahoo and Lycos. The thing I found most upsetting was the possibility of having my email blocked by companies or people that got this spam or having my net connection closed because of spam reports.
Two stories, one related to /.
/. last weekend about the Simpsons cast on Bravo. To my utter shock, it was accepted and posted. I stupidly put my very private email (the one that didn't ever get spam) in the Email field. I know, I know...
.zip.pir attachments, and a few with blatant Trojans. Luckily, I'm OSX so they had no effect, but I was amazed how quickly the email hoovering app grabbed that email addy. They seemed more malicious than sales oriented.
I submitted an article to
Less than two hours later, I started getting weird email, complete with
I haven't received any today at that address but I'm still kicking myself. Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.
Story two: For almost five years I had the email bruce@altavista.net. In November, I got mail from Mail.com stating that the Altavista.net domain was being closed down and they were replacing my long-used address to something like bruce@way-cool-dude.com. Um, no thanks I said, I use this account for business and that doesn't work for me.
Ok, they said, how about we reactivate bruce@mail.com and you can have that? "Hmm, neat addy, easy to remember," so I agreed. They activated it on a Monday night.
Tuesday morning I woke up to more than 400 mails. Maybe 20% were typical Hotmail "make your penis so big you need a hose reel" spams but a full 80% were Joe jobs: spammers who had used that address as a reply-to. I knew I was going to shut it down but I watched it for three days just to see.
Total Joe job spams, almost four thousand (in three days) before I had them cut the damn thing off. Said fuck it, and bought a domain for business mail, and ended that adventure.
Someone oughta make a law.....
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Keith Henson, during a deposition. It's all over the place, but definitely here
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My girlfriend started getting a ton of bounced emails and not being a techie type person, asked me what the hell was going on...turns out the same thing happened to her as happened to the writer of that article: A spammer was mass mailing, in this case, penis enlargement pills, and setting her address as the reply-to.
Instead of writing a witty retort on a website though, I took care of it the way everyone else should from now on: (READ THIS) I looked up the registration info on the website that was being advertised in the spam....luckily it was a US registrant.
I then immediately called the technical contact listed for that company. After a few tries, I managed to get him to answer the phone. I told him politely but firmly that whomever he had hired to advertise his website/product was using questionably legal and certainly unethical tactics to do so and was making a lot more enemies than customers. He seemed genuinely upset that this was going on and gladly gave up the name, address, email address, and telephone number of the spam-mercenary he had hired. I called the spammer and left a voice mail telling him I hope he didn't really enjoy his email address or phone number a whole lot and proceeded to sign up for any and every mass marketing, porn, magazine subscription, and telemarketing form I could find.
Sometimes the operator of the website is the one doing the spamming, and if this were the case I would have chewed him a new one when I talked to him. Either way, you'll get a pretty good idea of where the spam is coming from if you just call the webmaster for the advertised site. I've been saying for years that this is how they need to enforce spam legislation....bring charges against the website operator rather than trying to track down the spammer. No customers to spam for, the spammers will dry up and blow away. Legally, it makes sense...if you hire someone to kill a person for you, you're legally culpable...so hiring someone to spam for you should get you into trouble as well. Make the first offense a "warning" in case they hired a marketing company and didn't know they were spammers. A slap on the wrist and warnings of heavy fines for future infractions will most certainly make them choose more wisely when picking a marketing company.
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