[DECtalk] Snoopi's messages

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I'll clarify how this probably 
happened, since I've seen it before on other lists, and the annoying 
thing is that once it happens, the real person can't do anything to stop it.

This tends to happen with large freemail providers E.G. AOL, Gmail, 
Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. What happens is that somehow, a hacker gets a 
legitimate user's Email address and password for one of these services. 
It could be through a phishing attack, spyware, or any number of other 
exploits. No matter how they get this information, they then log into 
that account and retrieve the user's address book. At that point, they 
can then start sending spam which appears to come from that user, to 
that user's friends, associates, mailing lists they're on, etc. Usually 
the messages have no subject or a very generic subject such as "Hey 
<recipient name>," and the body is usually just a link pointing to a 
spam website, usually with no text describing what the link is, and if 
there is any text it's usually very generic, such as, "Check this out" 
or "I thought you might like this." The horrible thing is, once this has 
started happening, the real, legitimate user of that account can do 
absolutely nothing to stop the spam. Even canceling their account with 
that provider won't help, since the spammers can still send Email which 
appears to come from that address even though it's no longer valid. As I 
found out a few years ago, even dying doesn't stop the spam, as I know a 
friend who kept receiving some spam from a friend who had died, and so 
there was no chance of anyone receiving any legitimate mail from that 
person ever again.

Jayson

On 5/7/2018 4:35 PM, Chime Hart wrote:
> Well Jason, on some other lists such as Blinux-and-vrstream, user 
> addresses are not sent out, just a name and a name of the list.
> Chime
>
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