Slashdot Mirror
Am I a Spam Zombie?
ReallyCurious asks: "Recently, I've noticed a lot of junk email in my inbox reporting 'Mail delivery failure' or 'Undeliverable'. Some of these had documents attached, so I figured this was just a worm variant. But these messages keep coming. I worry that my machine has been turned into a 'Spam Zombie'. I don't see any suspicious processes running, but maybe it only runs for a few seconds, and at irregular times. I run a Windows 98 laptop, sometimes wirelessly connected to broadband (a few hours a day, on average), but I had to remove my virus software years ago because it was locking my system up, so I'm wide open. I've tried to be a good citizen and have been shopping for new virus software, but prices are running $40-$70, and most of these are just for upgrades (not even counting the mandatory 'subscriptions')! Is there an open or free virus fighting solution that's reliable and available for Windows? I'd be happy to run it ASAP."
It may not be your system spewing out spam, but simply someone spoofing your domain.. happens to me every once in a while
Most likely your email address is getting used as the return address and little more - the returned mail thing affects everyone to some degree. If you were being used as a spam zombie, you'd probably not notice any change in returned mails, as the zombies generally use someone else's address again as the return addy. I'm fairly sure the return addresses aren't always randomised, as on my domains I see a bucketload of spam all from the same email address, so whoever lives there must be getting a bucketful of bounces.
Still, you really should get an antivirus solution to ease your worries. I use AVG from Grisoft, which is available in a free edition.
Of course, the bounces are plain annoying - when I get ACTUAL bounces from mail I send, I often delete them based on subject line, not realising that the person I was trying to contact is none the wiser. Booo
ok if you run windows you need a virus checker
are you a home user ?
if so
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/
and get avg for free
Now you need a firewall
http://www.free-firewall.org/
then I would advice get rid of spyware with spybot
donate something to the project if you like it...
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/
regards
John Jones
but if you're running a win98 without firewalling/serious tweaking.. ..you're probably owned or at least at risk. though in all fairness they're probably some other spammers who just happen to use your mail add as the sender.
go with FREE solutions, they exist.
http://www.free-av.com/ free virus scanning
http://www.free-firewall.org/ some free firewalling
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Here is the link to their free version This works well, and is completely free for personal use.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html Home version is free
Since the SMTP protocol doesn't have any authentication of the sender (except within an ISP/Domain with SMTP-AUTH), it's easy for a spammer/virus to send mail pretending to be you. That's called a 'joe-job' after one of the early occurrences of it.
A recently proposed solution (though not without it's problems) is SPF (Sender Policy Framework) http://spf.pobox.com/ where a domain owner can publish the list of servers which are authorized to send mail as being from a user of their domain.
Until it's widely deployed, not just on the publishing side, but on the checking side, it won't be real useful. However it's nearly trivial for the DNS owner to publish the records and since big ISPs like AOL and Yahoo are starting to check them it does protect you from being Joe-Jobbed to a large number of mailboxes.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I get boatloads of these things, as well as spam (filtering is your friend) -- my email address is fairly public and in a lot of address books. I'm not about to abandon it as it's within a domain I lease.
I run behind a fairly hardened firewall, and am moving towared a Linux iptables-based firewall/router/home server.
What ticks me off is when such a message bounce indicates that the original message contained a virus. How dare someone accuse me of sending a virus just because their mail daemon received a spoofed From: header? They could at least check the route the mail took against that header to get an idea if it's bogus. But, often automatic smam/virus filters are pretty stupid and trust the From: address. Still, I wonder if someone, somewhere, "out there" is blacklisting me because someone else forged my identity. Sounds like a defamation suit if I could find the bastards.
And that's the rub. Often when I've received such bounces, when the originator can be identified, they refuse to help in providing a copy of the original email, headers intact, that might permit tracking down the source: either a spammer, or a spam-zombie. I wonder if I could sucessfully file "theft of computer services" charges against such an organization: they're sending me unsolicited bounces, and furthermore, refusing to backup the allegation that they're bouncing messages from me. I wonder if the anti-spam legislation that's out there can be used as a club against those who send bounces to spoofed From: addresses and refuse to acknowledge or correct their mistake.
You could've hired me.