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OT - possible email virus?
 

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Pat Clancy
Joined: 13 Jan 2004
Posts: 1353
Location: Manchester, CT

2/20/17 10:14 AM

OT - possible email virus?

Every now and then I get an email from an otherwise trusted source like the following:

"hi! I thought you might appreciate this" - followed by a suspicious .ru address

I know enough not to click on it, and when I view the source code (HTML? Java?) for this one line message, it goes on for several very dense pages.

So, is the code really that inefficient that it takes pages to produce the one line? Or is something malicious hiding in the depths?

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daddy-o
Joined: 12 Apr 2004
Posts: 3307
Location: Springfield

2/20/17 11:13 AM

Phishing campaign

Well done.

You're using a good approach. Sometimes a trusted email address will be vacuumed up by a bad actor. The victimized address is nothing more than characters to display to someone who may be willing to open the email.

One side effect hurts a good address, an innocent player who has never been hacked, cracked or jacked can be used on the other side of the ocean and when people complain about spam from "there" the domain will start to be blocked by some ISPs, and it can snowball so Google and other big providers will refuse to handle mail with a return address from a particular domain. But the decision is made not on the actual return address but from the visible characters. At that point someone who has friends or associates with Gmail addresses can't send those friends email from their domain account because it's been blacklisted. The same mail works fine going other places.

Phishing, throw enough hooks in the ocean, something will bite. The email hooks they use are so inexpensive they can use a million to get one bite.

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

2/20/17 11:31 AM

"So, is the code really that inefficient that it takes pages to produce the one line? Or is something malicious hiding in the depths?"

Clearly it's the latter.

That's the whole purpose of the e-mail.

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KerryIrons
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 3234
Location: Midland, MI

2/21/17 3:26 PM

.edu

I get these a couple of times per month, sometimes from people I know and sometimes from random people, but the structure is always the same.

One thing I have noticed is that the random emails from strangers are predominantly from university domains (****.edu). It reinforces my doubts about the ability of college professors to actually manage their security.

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Sparky
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 19068
Location: PDX

2/21/17 3:36 PM

" It reinforces my doubts about the ability of college professors to actually manage their security."

It reinforces my faith in the tech depts at the colleges. ;)

If only... More likely a Prof with a bust of his cat on his desk with the name below using the same password...

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dan emery
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 6884
Location: Maine

2/21/17 4:22 PM

Spoofing

If you get a spam email purportedly from a certain address, that does not necessarily mean that the address's security has been compromised. Spoofers can send an email that looks like it comes from a certain sender and address, but does not. A response will go to a different address.

Someone enjoys ending emails that look like they come from me, asking others to wire me money. They do not come from my computer, they simply look like they do. When alerted to these I ask if they've sent the $ yet, but so far no luck.

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