IT Employment

love the reply Oz, how did you guess about me and the hot date......

I USED to get a few hundred a day, now it seems no spam and no dates, free cars, bank loans etc. (I won't comment on other email).

I miss all the wonderful opportunities to be rich, get laid and drive women crazy, but I don't miss wasting my day with email.

Reestablishing my Spam Filters but the ones that I like are telling me that the US Government has money to give away and all I have to put my hand out.

Or the ones telling me that interest rates have dropped so I'm welcome to apply for a loan against my house.

While a bit of a nuisance they are at least in acceptable quantities in the last e-mail download of 155 incoming there where only 25 that had to be added to the Spam Filter.

BUT and here is the big BUT I have been receiving a lot of incoming infected e-mails with Netsky {all versions} and while it doesn't hurt me as I have an effective AV setup it could very well hurt someone with a bit less Security or AV protection and while it shouldn't affect anyone from TR it would be far more dangerous if another less technically orientated site was spoofed.

Col

I never even looked at the alias. Probably another reason to use an alias instead of an email address. I guess we ARE hiding behind our aliases afterall, from spammers anyway.

A long long time ago I figured - let's go and buy a few domains, write a few redirection rules and see what happens.

So when I joined Tech Republic I used a new e-mail address - the only place this is visible on the entire net (until recently) was under "my account" on Tech Rep.

The e-mail address starts with techrep@xxxxx.com

The only e-mails I have ever received on this address are valid e-mails from Tech Republic, until now !

I'd be very interested to hear from someone in admin at TechRep as to how this has happened ???

Hey guys, just wanted to try and clear a a few things up.

First of all, I want to assure you that our e-mail delivery lists have not been sold to the scam artists you guys are talking about. We don't let third parties use our return address, as far as I know, and I am likely to have heard. Either way, we wouldn't have sold under ANY circumstances to these guys.

We're being spoofed, plain and simple, and we're working to find out why. The prevailing theory is that our recent efforts to improve our Google visibility and become more search-engine friendly have allowed spam-crawlers to comb our site for e-mail addresses. These spammers then spoof our return address as part of a social engineering scheme.

The best way to solve this problem is to make sure your peer alias is NOT your valid e-mail address. That way, the crawlers can't find it by combing the all-access portions of the site. You can still keep your address in your Peer Directory listing, which is available only to registered users. Crawlers can't reach that part of our site, so it's safe there.

Hope that helps.

-Jay Garmon
AKA The Trivia Geek

The largest telco in Western Canada was spoofed a while back, as well as NEC, Nortel and others.

Web crawlers pick up the @ sign in aliases and return them as valid email addresses, once email is accepted by the email server or the remove link is clicked by the sender it is confirmed and then kept on a list and resold.

The lesson learned here, never use an @ sign in an alias, post or signature, even people that sig with a web address for a personal site will have their site crawled for admin, info etc. email addresses on THAT site and the domain will also be spoofed and so on and so on....that's why it's a called a virus or worm and not just a targeted hack.

Thanks for confirming my faith in TR.

Chas