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Michael Green's 'How To' Forum
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How To Forum
Re: Has your email address ever been hijacked .. ??
Posted By: Bill Hely In Response To: Re: Has your email address ever been hijacked .. ?? (Chris)
Date: Sunday, 31 October 2004, at 5:09 a.m.
> Identity theft? I don't think you read the original post.
Indeed I did Chris. But it can be misleading to compartmentalize these issues, so I'd prefer not to focus too narrowly on the broad description of Paul's problem. I'm reluctant to mention address spoofing without pointing out that it often is more insidious than just a case of a spammer mis-identifying himself. If the spammer pretends to be some other *real* person, there is the potential for an innocent party to be harmed. That's as much identity theft as is someone trying to hire a car in your name. In either case you'll get the blame. In one case you may get the Amex bill; in the other you could lose your ISP account. Depending on what you do for a living, the latter could be by far the worse scenario of the two.
As we all know, sender-address and reply-address spoofing are commonly employed by spammers in an attempt to disguise their source. Quite often the faked address is completely bogus, made up, doesn't belong to anyone. But just as often (and it's becoming more frequent) it is a real address belonging to some innocent party.
An awful lot of the spam flying around the Internet is the direct result of the *theft* of a real reply-to address. The original one-off spam message is then often followed by a delivery failure message or an irate responses to the wrong person, an indignant denial from the falsely accused, inaccurate abuse complaints, etc. On and on like a merry-go-round.
The "delivery failure" messages automatically delivered TO THE WRONG PERSON by ISPs with single-digit IQs could occupy a long thread by itself.
And it all starts with the THEFT od someone's eMail identity.
When law-makers take this matter seriously and treat "identity spoofing" as "identity THEFT" we might eventually see some worthwhile legislation.
In the meantime, it's useful for everyone to know what to look for, the reasons that certain things happen, and the opportunities that are available to do something about it.
Best regards,
- Bill Hely
- Author: The Hacker's Nightmare
- http://HackersNightmare.com
How to keep hackers, worms and other 'germs' out of your PC.
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