The Lemon Fool

Hi all, a spam based query if I may.

I've started getting spam where the display name and/or the first part of the email address appears to be taken from my contacts. There are some very unusual names in there, and too many for it to be coincidence. The domain part of the email address is not correct.

I regularly scan my pc and am reasonably confident that I don't have any virus or other nasty that is reading my contacts (they're all in gmail), so what's going on? Where have they got the names from? Should I be concerned?

My brother in law this week received an email with my email handle in front of the domain name twcny.rr.com.
The link in the email was to slipcoverdesigns.com with extensions . He didn't click the link and checked to see if I'd sent it .
Yours anything similar ?

RedSnapper wrote:I've started getting spam where the display name and/or the first part of the email address appears to be taken from my contacts. There are some very unusual names in there, and too many for it to be coincidence.

It's possible that it's not your machine that has been compromised, but that of one of your contacts. And their contact list may contain a few shared contacts.

Scott.

poundcoin wrote:My brother in law this week received an email with my email handle in front of the domain name twcny.rr.com.
The link in the email was to slipcoverdesigns.com with extensions . He didn't click the link and checked to see if I'd sent it .
Yours anything similar ?

There's quite a large variety in both content and domain - I've not looked closely at the content, I just delete them (the gmail spam filter is excellent at catching them).

swill453 wrote:It's possible that it's not your machine that has been compromised, but that of one of your contacts. And their contact list may contain a few shared contacts.

Quite possible - they're all connected.

RedSnapper wrote:

poundcoin wrote:My brother in law this week received an email with my email handle in front of the domain name twcny.rr.com.
The link in the email was to slipcoverdesigns.com with extensions . He didn't click the link and checked to see if I'd sent it .
Yours anything similar ?

There's quite a large variety in both content and domain - I've not looked closely at the content, I just delete them (the gmail spam filter is excellent at catching them).

swill453 wrote:It's possible that it's not your machine that has been compromised, but that of one of your contacts. And their contact list may contain a few shared contacts.

Quite possible - they're all connected.

I'm getting similar with malware email attachments with past clients names but totally-suspect domain suffixes.

Huge numbers of email address books were hacked from hotmail and talk-talk and the scammers are hoping that the unwary will trust a known contact.

Agree that routing a problem mailbox via gmail works well.

Also consider Mailwasher to check all emails remotely before allowing them to get onto your own computer - click on the free version.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

Yes, such spam as I get (not much, thankfully) is apparently (name is right, domain is not) from friends I know to have been compromises at some time in the past. It's not you, it's them - nothing you can do at your end except filter it out, I'm afraid.

Thanks all.

As I can't rec I'll toast you all tonight - after England have thrashed the saffers