E_mails

It would seem that some of our members have been receiving highly suspect e-mails that "seem" to have originated from various club members.
I have received two from members that i have never corresponded with, & Phunkdoctaspock has kindly contacted me, re one that appeared to have come from me. He has since received another from the US.

I now speculate that someone has harvested the e-mail addresses & nicknames of 1200.com members & is using these nicknames as a cover when sending these suspect e-mails to other members.

The two that i received had an attacment & a short text message saying something like "open this immediately", or some other message compelling one to open the attachment.

MODERATOR.
Can you shed any additional light here?

MEMBERS
DO NOT open any attachments unless you are sure that you know it is safe.
If you get an unexpected e-mail from me with an openable attachment, delete it immediately.
I send only pictures that are not in a separate attachment, to people that are expecting them. or who know me.

Chris

I have had similar things happen with datnet and a couple other sites that I have visited in the past months.

Programs called Spambots crawl the web and search for the @ symbol that is associated with all of our addresses. If you have ever posted your email address on this site, then it is quite probable that a program like this has picked it up. From their, the program can also grab your username....there isn't a lot that can be done to stop it.

Once the Spambots have the addresses, automated tools can be used to send the mail out. I am guessing that the attachment was a text file xxxx.txt? It is the easiest to send because spam filters struggle to pick them up as spam mail.

Like Dodgeman said, if it looks dodgy, delete it. Its not worth the risk..

i got 2 suspect emails, but were not from spam. but i have got viruses from spam and one good prog to get rid of spam is ad aware 6.0 from download.com and it works wonders for your computer so for a little extra protection i recomend this program

not spam cookies is wat ad aware gets rid of srry

yeah i received one the other day with that attachment xxx.zip or wateva u said,but was unable to open it coz my virus scan said it was a virus, thing is it was from someone on this site's email nos_r100 ive seen it before and it said is this yours ? with just the attachment. very weird.

As ApHaSia4504 said, Adware 6.0 is a good program for getting rid of nasty popups and lots of other malicious crap that will collect your details and send it out. A good companion to that is Spybot Search and Destroy, it picks up a couple that Adware doesn't and vice versa.

spybot search & destroy.
www.safer-networking.org

is what I use for spyware, along with adaware.
I usually find that spybot finds more stuff...

I hope that viris writers, and spmammers all catch a nasty viris for themselves, AIDS would do quite nicely I think!

Thanks for emailing me about this Dodgeman. I had a look around and could not find anything suspisious. I have had something in my computer in the past that sent stuff out to people in my address book. This problem was eliminated awhile ago AND I never had your email address.
The guys/gals at www.DimeQuarterly.com add REMOVETHIS to the email addresses they list. Have a look at their classified section.
We all might want to consider doing something similar as well. I think I'll change mine right now.

Yeah it's the Netsky/Mydoom virus anyone who gets infected it sends out emails to any email address it can find on your computer, but it uses peoples names out of your address book as spoofed email addresses and names (basically comes from your computer but puts other peoples details on it, therefore they will email the return address saying WTF?? When it wasn't them in the first place.)
Everytime I get email through Outlook express, Vet Antivirus goes nuts and 2/10 emails I get are Netsky infected emails!!!

Bastard virus makers, I got infected by Mydoom a while back along with some other virus and I lost everything on my computer wasn't a happy camper

Damo