Re: Strange Emails -- What are they?

[wayne dawson <waydaws () telus net>]

Simon Smith wrote:
> Hi List,
>     I've had roughly one dozen people forward emails to me from
> different companies asking me to figure out what these emails are. The
> emails appear to be emails from the from the recipient. For example,
> John Doe appears to be sending an email to himself, but he's not. In
> reality when checking the mail server logs I find that the mails
> originate from the Internet.  Other emails like the one below contain a
> different sender than the recipient but the contents of the emails are
> the same and they are still from the same domain.
>
>
> -------------------- BEGIN EMAIL ----------------------
>
> Received: from 83.145.66.70 ([172.18.12.134])
>  by vms043.mailsrvcs.net (Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2-4.02 (built
> Sep
>  9 2005)) with ESMTP id <0J0E00AVSNH9ETG0 () vms043 mailsrvcs net> for
>  xxxxxxx () verizon net; Mon, 05 Jun 2006 15:55:58 -0500 (CDT)
> Received: from raptor.net (83.145.66.70)
>  by sv12pub.verizon.net (MailPass SMTP server v1.2.0 - 112105154401JY+PrW)
>  with  SMTP id <5-25035-180-25035-2228-2-1149540957> for
> vms043pub.verizon.net;
>  Mon, 05 Jun 2006 15:55:58 -0500
> Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:52:40 +0100
> From: "Gil.novak" <xxxxxx () verizon net>
> Subject: 586876
> X-Originating-IP: [83.145.66.70]
> To: "xxx.xxxx" <xxxxxx () verizon net>
> Message-id: <ayoznyepbslfqdlqblr () verizon net>
> MIME-version: 1.0
> Content-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
> Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxx.xxxx [mailto:xxx.xxxx () verizon net]
> Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 5:53 PM
> To: xxx.xxxx
> Subject: 586876
>
>
> 969
>
>
>
> -------------------- END EMAIL ---------------------
>
> Is this just another instance of spammers fishing for legit addresses?
> If so, then why the hell are they sending email from invalid addresses?
> I can dig into this a lot further if I need to, but I wanted to see if
> anyone else had any ideas about it first.  Thanks in advance!!!
>
>
> -Simon
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
> Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
> Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
>
>   
I think it's out now, but in case you haven't heard, jesse gough of 
security focus, said this was "a new Tooso/Beagle variant released a few 
days ago. It appears to be retrieving lists of email addresses and 
spamming them, and if the spam attempt does not result in an SMTP error, 
it will save the address to a "known-good" list and eventually upload 
that to a remote location. The numbers in the subject and body are 
randomly selected from a small hardcoded list (2 choices for the 
subject, 5 for the body). Nothing to indicate the significance of the 
specific numbers chosen, however."

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/