Re: spam return address backlash

[Conor McGrath <conormc () UCHICAGO EDU>]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 02:43:57PM -0600 Roger Safian said:
> Greetings,
>
> In the last couple weeks we have seen several of our
> addresses used as the from address in spam.  This
> causes few serious problems, but does generate an
> increase in the number of spam complaints to our
> abuse aliases.
>
> It does cause a serious issue if the chosen address
> used by the spammer, also happens to be a real
> address in use here at Northwestern.  We have
> heard of people receiving hundreds of bounced messages
> per day if this happens.  We recommend filters,
> but there's little else we can do to stop this.
>
> My questions are two.  Is this happening elsewhere,
> and if so, have you recently noticed an increase
> in this activity?

This is indeed happening here and we have seen an increase lately.
My personal email address has been used as have our various abuse
addresses.  The President of our Credit Union just sent a copy of one
that was bounced back to him as well so I would guess that it's also
happening to many other folks on campus although we haven't received a
large number of complaints.


-Conor

--
Conor McGrath                                           Phone: (773)702-7611
Manager for Network Security                            Fax: (773)834-8444
Network Security Center, The University of Chicago      NetSec: (773)702-2378
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