Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Hack Attack? Proof of Spoof?

Just got this in my Hotmail inbox:

What concerns me about these faux-Rolex spammers is they make the sender appear to be my edress.

Anybody else getting junk email that purports to be from me? 

9 comments:

  1. The SMTP From: header is not routable, authenticatible, verifiable or in any way enforceable. You should NEVER trust it. If you need to know who sent you an email, use S/MIME, GPG or PGP.

    This is spam, it is a spoof, but it is totally normal. If you like I can send you a few emails from president@whitehouse.gov -- it's not even illegal.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's common practice to make the to and from fields the same. They're not out there spamming as you.

    (The good news is it makes it dead simple to flag)

    ReplyDelete
  3. No I haven't, and if I did, I would know it's spam that you didn't have anything to do with.

    I mean seriously, a *Rolex*?!?

    A discount Garand, on the other hand....

    :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sometimes they *do* send spam email spoofed as your email address. Periodically, I get a huge wallop of send failures from some spam bot using my email address as the From address.

    That said, as mentioned above, it's pretty normal, and nothing to concern yourself about.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I get hundreds of spam emails every day purporting to come from my "editor" account at the Price of Liberty. I've trained my spam filter to catch them and never see them unless I choose to look.

    I use PGP encryption for many things, but most of my readers don't use it so I can't insist on it. At least not now. The time may come. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I just got an "unsubscribe from future emails" request--now what?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Never, never respond to a spam email.

    It just lets the spamer know they have a live address.

    Just let it go.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I get plenty of junk purportedly from myself...from fake fashion watches to male embiggening concoctions. If you've had an eddress in use for a couple of years you're guaranteed to see it used for bogus stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  9. NoelArmourson11/03/2011 8:14 PM

    If the "unsubscribe" link directs your browser to a spammer-controlled website, it may attempt to download malware to your machine.

    ReplyDelete

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