signed up to google group for spam

[Russell Fulton <r.fulton () AUCKLAND AC NZ>]

Hi

Just a heads up about something I stumbled across personally...

Recently I started getting spam about real estate in Pakistan.  I looked at the headers and they appeared to be coming 
from google groups servers so I sent one in to abuse at google.com complaining that someone had apparently signed me up 
for this group but the mails continued to come.

I also checked my gmail account to make see if I could see the subscription but nothing.  Then I went back to the email 
headers to look at the envelope sender and it was my university email account which I have never used with googlegroups 
(so far as I can remember).

So I tried sending email to the unsubscribe address as listed in the headers and that worked and then tried to log in 
using my uni email but that failed so I reset the password and got the email to complete the password change. When I 
got into the account it was just a bare shell with nothing at all (since I had already unsubscribed from the google 
group).

It would appear that somehow someone managed to get an account with my email set up in google groups and then abuse it 
to send me spam.   It is conceivable that I did have a google group account for that email address but someone still 
managed to get me subscribed to the list with out  my say so.   

The other odd thing is that, when I was first investigating, I searched google groups for the offending group but could 
not find it.


Russell Fulton
Information Security Officer
The University of Auckland