Interesting People mailing list archives
Email harvesting?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:54:48 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Darrell Greenwood <darrell.usenet5 () telus net> Date: November 24, 2006 5:14:12 PM EST To: bkoball () well com Cc: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] Email harvesting? At 3:16 PM -0500 24/11/06, David Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: Bruce R Koball <bkoball () well com>
<snip>
Am I crazy to think that spammers may be using some mechanism (packet sniffing?) to perform a sort of key-word harvesting to get around filters and induce recipients to read their messages.
Technically possible, but not likely, would be my guess. Too complicated for the end result.For whatever it is worth, I have been keeping an eye on spam since it began.
There is no question email address harvesting happens, I have a number of email addresses that I only keep around for use as spam traps and checking the effectiveness of spam filtering. An unprotected address that was exposed briefly to address harvesters ten years ago is now getting spam at the rate of one every hour. Another address similarly exposed but which now has greylisting and spamassassin is down to one spam a month as I tinker with the spamassassin filtering. Surprisingly to me simple munging works to defeat address harvesting, my site http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw has had the same munged email address on every page up for years (I increment the number when spam arrives at the address) and it is a popular site which owns the Google search term 'sourdough'. At my regular address which has no protection I get no spam, I rely only on address management and discarding compromised addresses by incrementing the number in the address. The story of Nadine, http://www.honet.com/Nadine/ shows once an address is compromised you only have two choices, discard it, or rely on ever increasing filtering with the chance of false positives. I choose to discard compromised addresses. Back to your question, currently it would appear most spam is out of zombies, e.g., http://tinyurl.com/ymtzek thanks to Bill Gates. The same zombies could easily be scanning your email if they are on the same LAN as you. See http://tinyurl.com/4z9g5 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnets If your personal mail is being scanned to provide material to defeat Bayesian filtering you are unquestionably among the first to so suffer :-) Cheers, Darrell ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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