[Amps] Spam and worms attachments from mailing list

[Will Matney]

Steve,

I agree, there's other ways to do it but were speaking of worms which are e-mail generated by victims computers. Courier has a good junkmail filter too, but a few can slip though because they keep changing the title of the attachment, plus the sender always changes. Finally, the filter gets educated enough to start trapping say 90% of them.

I know from experience that my last e-mail never had any worms sent for several years until say the last 2 when I joined this group and 1-2 others on Yahoo. Now that I dont have the old e-mail, which has been clean until about 1 week ago when the new worm came out, and that this mailer is all I signed back up for, that leaves this place to where they've either mined the old posts or someones address book got out. It could possibly be what you mentioned too but they'd have to feed the addresses they hit to the worm.

Spam on the otherhand is the work of unscroupulous companies harvesting e-mail off the net to send junk mail to. That yet I have only gotten but a very small amount with the new e-mail, maybe 1 piece every 4-5 days if that. I believe this list has been hit by both the worm, and a hacker using a data miner. The reason being, I've received 2-3 e-mails from the scams out of Afirca, and I think one other country, wanting you to bank money for them offering a huge payment for doing it. Even though they say they're in such and such country, don't mean they are in reality.

But as in my original post, they have to get your e-mail addy to send it to, by either a worm, data mining, or buy a blitz mailing using common names over a complete net block. The bounces are thrown out, and the hits then used.

Best,

Will


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 8/27/05 at 6:59 PM Steve Thompson wrote:

>Will Matney wrote:
>
>>BS!
>>
>>They have to KNOW your e-mail address to send it too! 
>>
>Not necessarily. There's many spam and/or virus generators out there 
>that send to thousands, if not millions of random prefixes to common 
>ISPs, in the expectation that a handful will be valid.
>
>Thunderbird email prog is very efficient at catching junk mail. AVG is 
>good, free, virus protection, Sygate personal firewall closes lots of 
>holes. Some ISPs offer spam filtering at source on your mailbox.
>
>Switch to Linux or Mac, use Thunderbird, and it all goes away.
>
>Steve