Malicious Email?

[Coldamus]

In the last couple of days, I've started to receive a new type of spam email. There don't appear to be any attachments but the text is made up of a huge list of keywords in alphabetic order. The sender name appears to be randomly generated from a list of famous persons.

I opened the first one but closed and deleted it as soon as I saw the contents. I then deleted all temporary files and checked my registry and start-up folders for trojans. There's no sign of any damage and Zone Alarm did not raise any alerts, but I'm now getting similar spam on a regular basis.

I am deleting them now without opening. Previously my spam count was almost nil but I just signed up for an internet domain name and the spam started immediately afterwards.

It is annoying but, more importantly, is it trying to do? Does anyone know the purpose (or intent) of this type of spam?

regards
Coldamus

[arose62]

They are trying to stuff up anti-spam measures.

You used to be able to delete anything with "Viagra" in it, but if just about every word in the English language is used in spam, the anti-spam measures which try to 'learn' will get confused and/or overloaded.

Cheers,
Andrew

[Cliff Rogers]

...just signed up for an internet domain name and the spam started immediately afterwards....
Not much you can do there other than set up some anti-spam rules on your mailserver if you administer it yourself or pay your host to do it for you.
Once the spammers find a valid domain name they have a big list of likely valid e-mail addresses to try at that domain name IE.
admin, info, sales, service, test, guest, webmaster, complains, abuse.... etc

[Tasman]

I used to receive about 200 spams a day and being on dial up it took so long to down load them it was hard to stay sane for long so i now go into my home page from my server and log in to my emails and delete every thing and any one i dont know which leaves only a couple to down load.......Saves so much risk and time ........

Reguards Tasman.........

[Coldamus]

Thanks Cliff and Andrew. That is going to be difficult to combat. It seems that passive spam filtering is not enough. I will have to give some thought to a more active system.

regards
Coldamus

[Cliff Rogers]

I also use Mailwasher, allows me to preview mail while it is still on the mailserver & tag it for deletion & do a clean up before downloading the ones I want.
Faster than trying to do a clean up via web mail.

[arfabuck]

Have you notified your server admin to remove the "anything@....."?

When a new domain is generated, it automatically starts out with the 'anything' assigned. This means that you can put 'kissmekate@... or bigfat lobo@.... or anything else before your domain name and you will get it in your inbox..

It is a simple 2 second procedure for your web host to remove the code and you will not get anymore spam.

FWIW

Art

[arfabuck]

Sorry, I meant to explain the cause and effect.

It is known by the name of "phishing"

There are cretins out there who just wait for a new domain name to be issued and latch on to any that are open to 'anything'.

Once a confirmed response has been received ( by opening or replying to the phishing ) they are then able to hijack your domain name to further their nefarious intent. It will not do anything to *YOUR* computer, neither will any anti-spam programme yet written eradicate it unless your domain is specifically written in, but you can bet you will be getting heaps of "unable to deliver" messages as soon as they start using your domain for further phishing trips.

I suggest you get on to your isp asap otherwise you are going to be swamped - like 500 useless mails a day or more and exceed your allowance.

Art

[ubeaut]

Are they addressed to you or are they being bounced back to you. Often with a new domain name you receive open email address ie. [email protected] may be your address but it is most likely that anything @bob.com could work like [email protected], [email protected] [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc....... Think you get the picture.

Now a spammer sees this open email address and latches on to it sending out literally millions of emails from your address with [email protected] and many of them bounce back to you. It is highly possible this is what you are getting rather than outright spam. But I could be wrong. Contact your service provider or host and they should be able to fix it for you. It is in their interest to help as it is possible that if left unchecked it could clog their email server and bring it to a grinding halt.

I know as it has happened to me on a couple of occasions and hes almost crippled our local ISP.

Hope this is of some help.

Cheers - Neil :)

[q9]

Ubeaut is thinking of a catchall address, which, basically catches all email addressed to the domain, but where it can't find an actual mailbox. It is usually something that you have to specifically enable (or of course it has been enabled by default). The reason you would want such a feature is that it enables you to catch mail where someone has spelt your name wrong eg [email protected] - it goes to the catchall account and you can retrieve it.

I would suggest that you also go to www.kaspersky.com and run the online virus test - it is very good and very thorough.

Worth looking into whether your account provider provides any kind of anti-spam measures on your email as well. While you're there, set up a proper catchall address, and just check it every now and then using a webmail tool (most isps/webhosts provide webmail).

[Coldamus]

Thanks for the answers. I apologise for taking so long get back. Now that you mention it, I took a better look at the spam and it is not addressed specifically to me but to random names at the same domain. I will take up the issue with the domain registry/hosting co. as you suggested.

However I was more worried about trojans than anything else and that does not seem to be an issue in this case.

regards
Coldamus