Telstra Denies Selling BigPond Customers' Data

Red Wolf writes "The Age reports that allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco. Melbourne-based IT worker Mark Edwards had doubts in this direction when he began receiving unusually large amounts of spam at his bigpond email address. Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users."

Comments

Mass Spam to a Single Domain

[Goody]

This happens all of the time -- it's called a spam dictionary attack, as the article attempts to explain. Spammers simply use every possible username in the world and append @yourdomain.com hoping to nail every user with their offers of bigger appendages.

The part in this article about spammers testing for the validity of a dictionary-generated email addresses is a load of crap. They could care less if the address is valid or not. They simply let the bounce message go out into never never land.

I doubt Telstra sold any email addresses. Dealing with spam attacks isn't worth the meager revenue that would be derived from selling addresses.

Re:It could be a staff member

[Fizzl]

Umm... No?

How can anyone have such bad morale?
I had access to tens of thousands of credit card details as a developer for one database application.

I left the company in very disgruntled mood. Yet I never was even slightly tempted to copy the databases or details of the communications how the details are transferred around the country.
I had some company code and documentation home because I used to work remotely at times. I erased the data and returned the dead-tree docs in mail.

Althou email addys and credit card details are in totally different categories, I think of the people who own the information. It's not like it's their fault your getting shafted.

I do not have a criminal mind. I'm prolly going to die poor :(