Re: Address harvesting of EDUCAUSE?

[Jim Barlow <jbarlow () NCSA UIUC EDU>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 11:06:06AM -0600, Alan Amesbury wrote:
> Is it common for vendors to harvest e-mail addresses from the EDUCAUSE
> mailing lists? I ask because I've now received a couple e-mails (which
> were identical except for the first paragraph) like the one below,
> although I'm absolutely certain I didn't contact the company that
> purportedly sent them. Besides, the message below clearly implies
> EDUCAUSE was where the sender obtained my e-mail address.
>
> My tendency is to shy away from products that are sold via unsolicited
> commercial e-mail ("spam" in my book), since I think buying such
> products would only encourage more spam. I think the vendor can't be
> *too* "heavily engaged with the research community" as most researchers
> I know tend to despise spam (but I could be wrong).
>
> Anyway, I was just curious if this was a common occurence or not, at
> least as it relates to EDUCAUSE, and whether EDUCAUSE policy encouraged
> this sort of thing.

I got two emails that were very similar to the one you got from the
same vendor.  One of them even stated:

   I have been speaking with Alec Yasinac from FSU and he has informed me
   that your department is constantly undertaking research and
   development in the fields of networking and network security.

I don't know a Alec Yasinac, or if one even works at FSU.  I originally
wrote it off as someone in one of our security research groups giving
my name to someone, but looks like Endace may have harvested address
from this list.  Guess it depends on how many other people on this list
got email from them.


--
James J. Barlow   <jbarlow () ncsa uiuc edu>
Head of Security Operations and Incident Response
National Center for Supercomputing Applications    Voice : (217)244-6403
605 East Springfield Avenue   Champaign, IL 61820   Cell : (217)840-0601
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~jbarlow                    Fax : (217)244-1987

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