E-mail Spoofing

[Buzz]

Apparently spammers have devised a way to flip the "To and From" on e-mails and they send them to you as a returned mail/ failed delivery e-mail. This bypasses the spam controls in place. Since I hadn't sent out any e-mail today, I became concerned and contacted AOL tech support. I was told where to forward them if I received anymore and to delete them immediately. I did browse through the first one and at the bottom it had a URL ( which I didn't click on ). The tech said that my e-mail could have been grabbed from a friends computer that may be infected by one of those viruses going around.

Anyone else had an encounter with this??????????

Also, the tech said to check your sent mail folder to see if it was sent from your e-mail address. They had not, so mine is not compromised.

[strangercreek]

Apparently spammers have devised a way to flip the "To and From" on e-mails and they send them to you as a returned mail/ failed delivery e-mail. This bypasses the spam controls in place. Since I hadn't sent out any e-mail today, I became concerned and contacted AOL tech support. I was told where to forward them if I received anymore and to delete them immediately. I did browse through the first one and at the bottom it had a URL ( which I didn't click on ). The tech said that my e-mail could have been grabbed from a friends computer that may be infected by one of those viruses going around.

Anyone else had an encounter with this??????????

Also, the tech said to check your sent mail folder to see if it was sent from your e-mail address. They had not, so mine is not compromised.

This is actually fairly common. They are correct about an outside user with your email address in their contacts/address book is likely infected. A virus/malware on their PC starts kicking out network traffic that is essentially a bunch of email (even though they don't show them as ever being sent). The messages then go to other email domains where are seen as suspicious due to a few different reasons

1. the email address doesn't match the provider's email server or domain from where it was supposedly generated (ie your email abc@hello.com but the domain that is actually sending the message is @somethingelse.com, therefore doesn't match, then gets rejected by a spam filter

2. these messages are getting generated to email addresses that don't even exist (all depends on which bug/virus etc is causing the problem)

The reason you get the messages back in your inbox is because they are seen as legitimate email messages from you that were just rejected for some reason or sent to a bad address (email rejection notices are rarely considered spam, which is why they don't get filtered)

If the infected user is in a business setting, it is likely that there are not proper network traffic controls in place, allowing this to happen. If it is a home user, most of the time the only solution is for the virus to by removed.

There are companies out there with controls in place to stop these messages from coming through and the technology for spam filtering is changing all the time so there could be a different solution by they time I write this message. I see this happen within specific business communities, and it lasts a few weeks and then subsides, more of an annoyance than anything else. (something like this has happened within the legal community a few times in the past year, causing tons of law firms to get these emails for weeks at a time).

Hopefully this helps you with an idea of what is going on.

[Buzz]

That makes sense. After I sarted this topic I got hit with another 12 of those returned e-mails then my spamm filter started to pick them out. I haven't had any since.