[clug] unusual spam recently

[Daniel Pittman]

Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal at eyal.emu.id.au> writes:

> As of early today I received a number of spam messaged titled
> 	Action Required : Upgrade Your New Adobe PDF Reader
>
> Nothing out of the ordinary here, except that these were sent to
> aliases that I hardly ever use, mostly created for one purpose
> and only used by the one business at very low frequency.

[...]

> Is anyone else seeing such an event? Does anyone have an idea where
> else I should look?

The three most common causes for this that I am familiar with are:

1. You used an email localpart that someone else anywhere on the Internet used
   in a visible place.  Spam now flows to every previously used localpart at
   every identified domain, because it gets through to people who don't
   publish their details effectively.

2. Someone had that address in their address book, and it got pilfered (or
   given away) to the spammers.  (Typically by way of hostile code lifting it
   from them.)

3. Someone stole the database of the online service, and sold it as material
   for spam.

        Daniel

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