Dave’s spam attack

From Scripting News, Dave’s followup to a post about suddenly getting 1000’s of copies of the same message:

“Postscript: I hadn’t opened any of the emails, I just did, and saw that he’s marching through all four-letter combinations of email addresses at one of the domains I own. I turned off email forwarding, hopefully that should cause all the emails to bounce. Post-postcript: It did.)”

I watched something similar happen on our Postini setup. At first I let Postini process all email addressed to our domain. We got anywhere from 15-18 thousand messages per week. I changed it to drop (not bounce, just drop) all email not addressed to an actual, existing account or alias, and that dropped down to 2-3 thousand per week. The rest had been addressed to accounts that haven’t existed for years, or were hitting random name combinations in hopes of finding an actual account. Insane.

Similar Posts

  • Terrific training discussion

    Kathy Sierra has an interesting post on the Creating Passionate Users blog, about how to get our users past the “P” Mode, a reference to digital cameras. There’s a terrific, if somewhat lengthy, conversation taking place in the comments as well. I’m sure I’ll have something more to say about the idea, but I want…

  • Interesting tidbits

    Couple of interesting things I saw over at Chris’ Blog this morning that I think need to be shared. First, the good folks at Lockergnome have started up FileofTheDay.com. That might be something to keep handy when you’re in the mood for some good freeware or shareware. Secondly, the Barenaked Ladies have a blog. If…

  • Various updates

    Just a few things I put in my link blog that I want to have all in one post so I can look at them tonight, and you might be interested in. Skype Update Fixes Security issue Lookout version 1.2.3 released Top 10 Cool computing utilities -especially the Desktop Sidebar looks interesting Free CISSP Follow…

  • Some helpful stuff

    A couple of posts I’ve noticed that, if you do desktop support or end-user support, might prove to be helpful: 100 Office Tips Auto-runs: Find those pesky startup programs How to secure your wireless connection Enjoy! Follow these topics: Uncategorized

  • One of those days

    I had hoped the short week due to Thanksgiving would be a relatively quiet one, but today definitely did not fit into that plan. One of our servers crashed early this morning, creating all kinds of havoc around the helpdesk, and the day pretty much went downhill from there. It was one of those days…

  • Over the weekend

    If you’re not looking at the link blog, I’d just thought I’d spend a minute and show you what you may have missed. Over the weekend, when I typically do not post here, and this morning I pointed a few interesting things that I wanted to spend more time looking at later. I thought regular…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Your post must include a link to this post.

How does this work?
Write a response on your own website and include a link to this post. Then submit your response’s URL here. Your response may appear here after moderation. To update or remove it, edit or delete your original post and submit the same URL again. Learn more about Webmentions.