Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

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mikeybish
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Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#1 Post by mikeybish » Fri Apr 08, 2016 7:26 am

In the last month or so, the email address I used (and created specifically) to register on the forum a few years ago is getting spammed. I have never used this email address other than to register here on this forum.

Can anyone shed any light on how this may have been harvested/slipped out into the public domain?

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Mikey

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Alan Chatterton
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Re: Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#2 Post by Alan Chatterton » Fri Apr 08, 2016 8:17 am

I am sorry to hear that you are getting some spam on your email address.

I can categorically state that this will not have come from us. We do not publish or distribute anyones details at all. The email address is used by us, for admin on the forum, nothing else.
The forum is hosted on a secure webserver, hosted for us by a reputable company, who have no access to the data held within.

Sometimes, spammers just get lucky.
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David Withers
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Re: Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#3 Post by David Withers » Sat Apr 09, 2016 8:00 am

As the Administrator for the past six years of a totally different forum using the same phpBB system and the same web host, I confirm Alan's assurance as to the security of members' email addresses.

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Re: Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#4 Post by rlubikey » Mon Apr 11, 2016 12:17 pm

Mikey, like you, I use a simple system of unique addresses for various things, including club forums. From time to time, one of these places get hacked and I get a torrent of spam purporting to be from the hacking victim - which it obviously ain't. I'm convinced that my bike club's web host was hacked - though they never admitted it - when a whole group of my e-mail addresses were released. This included a forum notification used for nothing else, and with a difficult to guess address.

However, sometimes the spammers (pronounced "evil scum-bags") just guess. So perhaps in your case they got lucky?

I'm beginning to think there's a third possibility. They seem to be guessing too many of mine and I wonder if they're getting their information from somewhere else. I'm no expert, but I believe email doesn't make a direct jump from source to destination, but goes from node to node to complete its journey. Do the evil scum-bags hack these intermediate mail nodes and harvest our addresses that way???.

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Re: Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#5 Post by torque2me » Thu Apr 14, 2016 1:05 pm

rlubikey wrote:
However, sometimes the spammers (pronounced "evil scum-bags") just guess. So perhaps in your case they got lucky?

I'm beginning to think there's a third possibility. They seem to be guessing too many of mine and I wonder if they're getting their information from somewhere else. I'm no expert, but I believe email doesn't make a direct jump from source to destination, but goes from node to node to complete its journey. Do the evil scum-bags hack these intermediate mail nodes and harvest our addresses that way???.

Cheers, Richard
No luck involved at all I'm afraid. If I remember rightly we have had incursions in the past with regard to the forum web pages. Hackers don't advertise they have been into a system unless there is some vendetta or political point to score. They harvest so many electronic accounts of bank cutomers that they alone cannot deal with the volume and parcel the information out to other "nice" people to do the defrauding. Nor will shed loads of account names that you have created for one off purposes suddenly go on a walkabout visiting the world's nodes. There are bots that do harvest e-mail accounts and one should never put it in it's correct form but rather use DOT and AT which a human can decipher (there is at least one exception that I know of) but bots cannot.

Then there is the money/human factor - lists are sold/bought/.....hmmmm, distributed and these "lists" include millions of peoples e-mail addresses.

Oooh no, bad luck it ain't.


regards,

Kev

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Alan Chatterton
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Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#6 Post by Alan Chatterton » Thu Apr 14, 2016 6:55 pm

The problems we had on this forum was not hackers. We used to allow people to just register (excuse the pun!). This meant we had about 500 new users on the forum who then posted spam.
Now, you have to be approved (usually by me!) before you can join on here, which seems to have sorted it.



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Re: Forum Email Address Getting Spammed

#7 Post by mikeybish » Wed Apr 20, 2016 5:30 pm

Have changed registered email address and blocked old. Hopefully that should stop it!

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