groyster1
1483 posts
Oct 11, 2011
10:47 AM
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I have recently been getting failure notices in my email inbox that has only gone to forum members-has anybody else had this problem?my email is listed in my profile dont know if that is how its been infiltrated-I did get an order confirmation from hetrick that I did not make-very suspicious
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Todd Parrott
750 posts
Oct 11, 2011
11:50 AM
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I got a spam e-mail that appeared to be sent from your e-mail address, but I knew it was spam and just deleted it.
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nacoran
4726 posts
Oct 11, 2011
2:17 PM
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Check with anyone who might have access to your computer who might be pranking you, but failure notices for emails you didn't send are a bad sign. Make sure you change your passwords and run a virus check. Once you do that send out a notice to your mailing list that you may have been hacked. Remember passwords like birthdays are easy to guess if they are listed on your Facebook page.
As a general rule I suggest people don't leave their emails out in the open like that. Write it out so it makes it a little harder for sniffers to look for- something like, I use hotmail, and my username is JohnDoe1. It's not quite as user-friendly, but hopefully humans can tell you mean:
JohnDoe1@hotmail.com
and hopefully a computer won't.
And check with Hetrick and see what you ordered, and what the shipping address is.
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Nate
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groyster1
1486 posts
Oct 11, 2011
10:59 PM
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my email is on this forums profile and also my facebook profile but the bogus emails seem to be only going to forum members and did not order anything from hetrick tho I did order one from rockinron my virus protection shows no virus so the culprit must have come from a spammer that infiltrated this forum
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Steamrollin Stan
99 posts
Oct 12, 2011
7:24 AM
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just recieved an email from "armstrong carter" regarding my checking account by me or any other person was cancelled by the other financial institution, Herndon va 20171. With a link for rejection details, I aint clickin on that link, but this is the only strange email i've recieved for years. Any ideas out there?? (dont have a checking acc, and never heard of armstrong carter??)
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nacoran
4731 posts
Oct 12, 2011
10:21 AM
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Failure notices are usually generated when your email is sending out emails that aren't getting through. I suppose it would be possible for someone to send you fake failure notices. All they'd need in that case is your email. I suggest maybe contacting your email provider to see if they can tell you if they are real failure notices or fake (in other words, do they have record of the outbound emails that generated them.)
So, a couple more questions... do you have any information in your email folder that might identify fellow harpers? (Are they in a mailing list, have any tags related to harp?) Do you have different passwords for your email and this site? I suppose if you used the same password and they infiltrated the database they could have maybe got your email password.
Double check with anyone who might have access to your computer. Make sure no one was trying to find out what you want for your birthday or anything like that.
That's all I got off the top of my head. I'll refer it to support though. Is it alright if they contact you?
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Nate
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Last Edited by on Oct 12, 2011 10:28 AM
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MrVerylongusername
1988 posts
Oct 12, 2011
11:15 AM
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This seems to be happening more and more - the messages themselves are not (AFAIK) anything more than annoying spam - nothing malicious within them.
It's a sign that your email address has been hijacked and used as the reply-to address by a spammer. The undeliverable message indicating that the to address didn't exist, or that the message was rejected by the server as spam.
I'd never contemplate posting an email address on a public forum unless you were prepared for spammers. I wouldn't be surprised if the email harvester bots were clever enough now to spot addresses that are spelt out (i.e. joe dot bloggs at mydomain dot com)
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Steamrollin Stan
100 posts
Oct 12, 2011
11:23 AM
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I suppose my contact email could be used by anyone in other forewarded emails, but my email is not open at any other sites, i'll let it slide and keep an eye on things, thanks for concern. S.S...ps, I only ever use paypal and the other day i went to buy an album but they did'nt accept paypal, so i sent an email asking why?...maybe it went through as some kind of dud transaction, like i said, i'll see what happens.
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Learning To Reed
40 posts
Oct 12, 2011
11:28 AM
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Do these fuckers actually hack into your email account, or do they just make it LOOK like the e-mail was sent from your e-mail address?
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MrVerylongusername
1989 posts
Oct 12, 2011
11:32 AM
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No - in this case I think they're just making it look like the emails come from you. They are sending out thousands of spam messages and if they got the bounce backs their inboxes would gets maxed instantly.
Plus of course they don't want anyone to be able to trace their evil little asses.
However there are viruses which will hijack your system to send mail, so It wouldn't hurt to do a full virus and malware scan.
Last Edited by on Oct 12, 2011 11:39 AM
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nacoran
4737 posts
Oct 12, 2011
12:21 PM
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Steamrollin, your email isn't exposed here unless you actively add it to your profile. Admins have access to it but the regular members don't.
MrVLUN, yeah, putting your name online can be a risk, and I'm sure it's possible that crawlers are harvesting emails even in 'joe at' form. The more complicated you can make it without making it really hard for the people who want to legitimately contact you the better. Maybe we need a way to hide the emails behind a CAPTCHA. Someone diligent enough could still get them, but it would be harder.
Spammers are really insidious though. One way they get around CAPTCHA's I read about is they capture the image of the CAPTCHA and post it on porn sites. Then they get porn surfers to solve the CAPTCHA for them and they input it back on the original site. You might be able to foil that just by making sure all your CAPTCHA's require both hands to type!
I contacted MacWebsiteBuilders and there guess is that someone simply harvested the address from Groyster's profile or somewhere else on the web.
I've been thinking about this, and it seems they may be playing one of three games.
The first is they have hacked his email, maybe targeting it after finding it on here and are using it to send out emails to people on his mailing list. They'd be trying to get people to click on malicious links using Groyster's good name.
The second is they harvested his email and are sending him emails that appear to be failure to deliver notices and those notices themselves are an attempt to get Groyster to click on a malicious link. They could have harvested other emails left out in the open and then figured since they came from the same site you might know some of the people.
The third, as Learning to Reed suggested, they may have spoofed your address. The other people's servers may be sending you the failure notices to what they perceive as legitimate emails.
The advice is similar for all of them though. Scan for viruses, check with your email provider to see if they are real error messages, change your password and send out a warning to people on the email lists. Even if the you use the same password for your email and for the forum (which you totally shouldn't do) there would have to be a security breach on the server level to give your password to someone (and again, the server would only have your forum password, not your email one).
IMPORTANT: If anyone else has any problems, let us know. That could be a sign of the dreaded fourth possibility. The servers MBH is on shouldn't have any information though that would help access your email, beyond your address. (Again, unless you use the same passwords here and for your email, which you shouldn't do, just as a matter of best practices.)
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