Forwarded mails and viruses
I’ve been warning about forwarded mails. Hoaxes, chainmails etc. I’ve said they’ll eventually end up with spammers.
And I forgot one thing: It’s probably too much work to manually collect all those e-mail addresses.
Enter viruses.
We know they check address books. I don’t positively know there are viruses scanning through the bodies of e-mail on a victim’s harddrive, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
So being a recipient twice removed of a hoax, may theoretically compromise your e-mail address.
Comments?
May 7th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I haven’t seen this pattern lately and I do not know if it is related to the higher volume of spam reported this past week. (Spamcop reports a spike) I never forward email to anyone. I find it annoying to be a recipient. Sometimes, I tell people who do forward me hoaxes, etc to use BCC and go to snopes.com if they are not aware first.
With this Blue Security attack, many people out there are reporting loads of returned messages (spoofed from addresses in spam) and much higher volumes of spam. The spammer is sending out Blue Security spam too, to besmirch the name Blue Security.
Take a look at Castlecops for more detail.
http://castlecops.com/f230-Blue_Security.html