{Stus-List} Spammer removed from CnC-List

[Leslie Paal]

Collin,

I agree in parts and disagree about some.  

The most important aspect is to 'find' valid email addresses to spam.  Do you do electronic banking?  The bank has your your email address; have you read how they last updated your 'privacy' notice about sharing your information with commercial partners.  So, do you know who has your email address?  Same for any online purchase, etc.

There are many ways to harvest addresses, and they can be used for both sending and receiving.  At times received spam email from myself...  ;-)

I know that my .gov address was out there since I published papers /documents and had to provide contact point.  I was assured by the company security experts that I did not do anything incorrect.  Luckily it was easy to filter based on the subject or content.

Nowadays almost all spam comes from botnets using harvested email addresses; so free email or .gov address, all the same.  Filtering only on 'from' is insufficient, luckily most filters do scan the subject, content for keywords.  Of course the spammers found ways around, they just send the spam text in  a picture.  The chase goes on.

Good, thoughtful behavior on the web makes things a bit better and it all helps.  Not falling for 'social engineering' tricks is important.

Leslie.
C&C related: Thanks for the Caribbean show, GREAT.  I tried to put the scenery to locations, mostly unsuccessful.  Do you have a blog about your trip?

-- On Sat, 1/29/11, Colin Kilgour <charliekilo552 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Colin Kilgour <charliekilo552 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: {Stus-List} Spammer removed from CnC-List
> To: cnc-list at cnc-list.com
> Date: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 6:31 AM
> Leslie -
> -----------------%<