PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I know there are a lot of experts amongst the "Z" community so I wonder if you can tell me how this has happened:

I checked my email this morning to find a new email FROM MYSELF !!! It was a spam job (usual sex things) but of course I'm concerned about this.

Has someone nicked my email address now?
Am I at risk of other problems because of this?
What would you do?
How can someone steal my email address and use it like that?

Help !!

don't worry, Neil... they just generate those adresses randomly by software generators in million quantities.
The 'adress-string' (both sender and receiver) is worth nothing on it's own.
Anyone can set any string and it just needs a few lines of code - no dedicated server or so.
That's why spam has become such a mass problem.

Adresses are only 'valid' together with the domain information in the sending path, but one usually doesn't display detailed header information in mail software.
Generally it's not a problem because most service providers takes care of this in their anti-spam strategy, but occasionally one slips through - they use more sophisticated methods than dumb name checks today...

cheers, Tom

I could quite easily have been scraped from any number of locations as well. If you can 'get' a few hundred thousand email addresses and are reasonably sure at least some percentage are still active you can charge a hundred bucks or so for that to many spammers. Not that I'm into such things...but there are many ways to recover data from servers that you might use (facebook/general websites etc) beyond just scraping the data that's directly exposed. For instance google the recent sudden 'awareness' that you need to keep memcached firewalled (gee, you need to keep access to your scratch disk firewalled too, go figure.)

I subscribe to SpamDrain. It gets rid of most my spam daily :

http://www.spamdrain.net/en/home.html

I can recommend it for a few bucks a month, it does the job and you get to try it on a 30 day free trial.

Thanks for the replies - you've managed to reassure me.
I've got a good anti-virus (etc) package but it just panicked me for a while.
I was worried about on-line ordering of goods etc in case I got my identity stolen.
Relax Neil relax

We actually covered this once or twice in the not-so recent past on the OT section here, not that I expect you to search for it but rest assured you're not the first person to be alarmed from the Z.

Honestly I stopped subscribing my personal domain to anti-spam and just funnel everything into gmail now that has a public facing address (forwarding etc.) I also setup a few layers in my financial/private email accounts that are exposed to the world so that it's easy to track where email addresses are leaking. It's very easy to setup a long list of forwarding addresses that are just an added extension based on usage/website so that different places have different variations on the actual mail account that everything funnels into. Then when I start seeing ebay_MyName@MyDomain.com show up in my account with spam I know who the culprit was.

Thannks again and thanks for the link - feel better now

Sorry for the link without words; I was in a hurry... looks like I've got a f*king rootkit here...

That's not good. Clean it from a separate system or use BART PE & some good rootkit tools installed under it. VistaPE & Win7RescuePE also exist but I haven't tried them (occurs to me BartPE might not like a Win7 formatted disk as it might be guid/GPT rather than MBR partition scheme....)

BartPE plugins here.

i had 2 emails from myself today, from 2 different addresses i have. i must be trying to tell myself something, both were telling me to go to this one website to get some viagra.

garyb wrote:i had 2 emails from myself today, from 2 different addresses i have. i must be trying to tell myself something, both were telling me to go to this one website to get some viagra.

They reckon the first sign of madness is taling to yourself. The second sign is when you answer back and disagree with yourself. Are you okay Gary?

Strange how the links are always either to viagra or penis enlargement sites eh?
I've never had one for a penis reduction site

That should be better.

It's probably useless to specify, but the rootkit issue isn't related to the mail topic; it's happening now whereas the mail address issue was three years ago for me.

The rootkit entered my brother's machine through a pendrive (he has XP home installed and wasn't able to disable the autoplay feature) then the infection expanded since he didn't disconnect the machine from the web. The threath probably succedeed in corrupting anything in my Win7 netbook when it has been connected in local network with the infected machine backing up user data. The OS and FSecure AV were updated in my netbook, but the computer started hanging up after that. I had to reinstall and reconfigure on both

madness....yes.