Questions tagged [spam]
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.
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What is the point of gibberish spam
I fairly often happen across forums spammed with messages such as:
Arugula (Eruca sativa) is an quarterly green, pretended or roquette.
It's been Traditional times, overclever 20 flat has be ...
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What malicious things can happen when clicking on links in email?
I've received a spam from one of my friends (well I'm sure he didn't send it). so there's this link, and i'd thought what exactly would be the implications of clicking the link (i've not clicked it ...
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How does Bayesian poisoning work?
This answer mentions Bayesian poisoning in passing and I've read the wikipedia page but don't feel I've fully grasped it.
The first case, where a spammer sends a spam with a payload (link, malicious ...
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How do I safely inspect a suspicious email attachment?
I received a pretty blatantly spammy email to my Gmail account. Attached to the email is a supposed HTML file. My first hunch was that it was probably one of the following:
A nasty executable file ...
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What does this malicious PHP script do? [closed]
Somebody hacked my site and uploaded this script (template46.php) to my webroot and its content is:
<?php
$vIIJ30Y = Array('1'=>'F', '0'=>'j', '3'=>'s', '2'=>'l', '5'=>'M', '4'=>'...
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How are spammers using LinkedIn "http://linkedin.com/slink?code=..." URLs?
I was sent this kind of link from presumably compromised Skype account, via a skype message (do not click unless you have a sandbox or something to protect you):
https://www.linkedin.com/slink?code=...
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Is there a true alternative to using CAPTCHA images?
Security is about balancing costs and risks, nothing is impossible to beat, specially not typical CAPTCHA implementations, but they do add something no other system seems to offer.
I've been reading ...
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Is using 'dot' and 'at' in email addresses in public text still useful?
When entering your email address publicly, a practice is to replace . with text dot and @ with text at. I assume that the reasoning is that this way automatic email-collector robots won't match your ...
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What are common/official methods of reporting spam/phishing/nasty-grams to organizations?
A user of mine just received a phishing email claiming to be the IRS. What methods of reporting are available, and what should be included?
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Why set up DMARC for SPF if it's already set up for DKIM?
I have SPF and DKIM. I'm planning on adding DMARC to tell receivers to expect SPF and/or DKIM. I've read that it's best to set DMARC up with both SPF and DKIM, but I don't understand exactly when ...
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What is the purpose of "gibberish" comments posted to my blog?
Fairly frequently, the contact form on my blog gets comments that look similar to this (each field represents a text box users can enter into the HTML form on the blog):
Name: 'ceguvzori'
Email: '...
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what to do after suspected intrusion on hobby webserver
I maintain a server to host my files and a number of websites for hobbies and friends. I just noticed that the site summary being returned in google for one of my domains were all porn related (...
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Databases with spam, phishing email examples [duplicate]
I'm working on a little project trying to see if I can predict the likelihood that an email is in fact a security risk (phishing, spam, social engineering, etc).
I order to do this I need to have a ...
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What risks do I have now that I accidentaly opened a suspicious URL send to me by Skype?
The following URL was sent to me by a trusted Skype contact (from my university):
WARNING - DO NOT CLICK IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING
http://bit.ly/28PPw3V#dahubas=my_skype_id
I clicked on ...
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spam with my own domain
At my work we have a very tricky issue with spam. We use postfix, and recently began to receive several spam mails from our own domain.
This is obviously very prejudicial for us, because many ...
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Is this some kind of Bayesian poisoning?
So I've been reading my spam lately, and today I received this:
To: my actual email, but with a name found here: tel2name.com (only hit on Google)
Subject: one seemingly random excerpt of a web ...
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Good ways to prevent spammers from registering [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Is there a true alternative to using CAPTCHA images?
Since everyone hates captchas what are good alternatives? I'm looking to prevent the automated creation of accounts on a ...
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Unsubscribe safely
I have heard that is better to never click to any link in an email. Is it a bad idea to click to a unsubscribe link? What is the best way to unsubscribe to undesired mails?
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How did this paypal spoof email pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC
This mail that got through has me stumped. It appeared to me as being from PayPal <[email protected]> in my Inbox. I happened to look at the original and it says SPF, DKIM and DMARC ...
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Is this "Domain Registration Service" email a scam?
I received an email to the email address listed on our website (it's a generic [email protected] to help "weed out" spam, whereas each employee has something like [email protected] to which I ...
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How can I get more spam for my honeypot?
Spam is everywhere and everyone gets it (especially professors), but I noticed that my personal email does not get much spam. How can I get more?
What are the most common ways of getting spam? Not ...
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Email unsubscribe handling security
There is another question with similar title: Unsubscribe safely
however my question addresses completely another issue.
I am trying to set up a notification system in the website, that will send ...
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Would 'spam' mail really avoid eavesdropping?
spammimic.com offers a service that 'encrypts' your mail as 'spam', the rationale being that all mail services automatically filter out spam, and so if you're wanting to communicate with someone ...
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What is this Russian calendar reminder that popped up?
I woke up this morning and saw a calendar reminder that I definitely did not put there, written in Russian. It would be super helpful if anyone knows what the text means, but I figured opening the ...
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How can we protect signup APIs from brute force registration?
This is a general question but its prompted by a fairly open API I have for a file storage service that needs to have its front door better locked down.
We have an API like POST '/signup' that just ...
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Failed to send emails that I never sent
Some months ago, I started to receive some emails from "Mail Delivery Subsystem" ([email protected]). Despite this is "automatic" failure email, I thought these emails were spam, so I just ...
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spam: several secret inboxes targeted at once. risk or coincidence?
I have a domain that is only used by me, with several inboxes in the format aep-x-company@domain, where I replace 'company' with wherever I sign up. This way I can detect when someone sells email ...
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random-string spam probe messages?
For years, we've been receiving messages through our contact form in the following format:
name: vlsyekcz
email: [email protected]
subject: BdsQiWYlYo
body: 2BLgIr <a href="http://aixfhxcynapd.com/...
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What are the dangers of a mailto link?
I was looking through my spam folder, and there's a 100% sure spam email, that asks me to confirm that I want to unsubscribe by clicking some big unsubscribe button. That button is simply a mailto: ...
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"Secure" emails from unfamiliar source(s)
The context is long, so I'll ask my question first.
If an encrypted message is received from an unfamiliar sender and it's spam, how can I avoid receiving further messages of the same sort?
If it's ...
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How can these spam emails be accessing email accounts on respected domains?
Today I received a spam email from [email protected] requesting to contact Harry Black about a charity project. His email address is [email protected].
After I had done so and fallen for the ...
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Why is blog spam always written so badly?
Some spam messages fresh from my Wordpress filter:
Asking questions are in fact pleasant thing if you are not
understanding something totally, except this article gives good
understanding yet.
...
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What is the purpose of these weird non-spam emails?
A mail made it through the spam filter and i wonder what the purpose is. It is not spam.
Tracking? But how? Who? and why? In the source code there are this weird passages like ...
=EA=85=9F
=EA=8F=...
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Spam that comes from names in my address book, but not their email addresses
I've recently received two spam messages that show a possibly worrying degree of knowledge about my contacts, and I'm wondering how concerned I should be.
Specifically, the names -- but not the email ...
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Hashcash, is this really used?
I just heard about this term, is it really used? The concept does not seem new, is it used and/or implemented in current technologies?
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How did the spammers get this address?
A few months ago I configured a test mail server on Amazon AWS, all legit. I used a new address to my catchall-domain (something similar to, but not exactly, test-config-aws-neptune-2014-08@my-domain....
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How to protect contact forms against being misused for mass-mailing?
A common function of contact forms is to send the contact message not only to the site owner but also to the person who sent the contact request. What are good measures to protect against the form ...
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Is there a dictionary of visibly similar Unicode characters for Spam processing?
I have spam that looks like this:
мy вυddy'ѕ мoм мαĸeѕ $74/нoυr oɴ тнe lαpтop. ѕнe нαѕ вeeɴ lαιd oғғ ғor
ѕeveɴ мoɴтнѕ вυт lαѕт мoɴтн нer pαy cнecĸ wαѕ $19420 jυѕт worĸιɴɢ oɴ
тнe lαpтop ғor α ...
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Does disabling "Always display external images" in Gmail remove the risk of spam senders seeing that I opened the mail?
When a mail is opened that includes special images, fonts or media, it is loaded from the server of the sender. This is bad because spammers can detect active mail accounts that will get more spam. ...
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Are automatic "out of office" email replies bad security practice?
I remember reading somewhere that you shouldn't reply to spam because it confirms that the email is used, and makes it more likely that you will be targetted.
Does this mean that automatic replies ...
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Is Mailbait still a threat?
Is Mailbait (or similar services) still a threat, was it ever a threat, and if so how can it be mitigated?
Mailbait is that service that promises to fill up your email inbox by sending you a huge ...
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What is the point of spam mails containing nothing but random letters?
I recently started replying to spam (as proposed by James Veitch), logged into an old email account and noticed (much to my delight!) a couple of hundred spam mails. Oddly enough I stumbled upon an ...
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Block spam that looks like it is coming from actual humans, and not bots?
I work for an educational institution, and we are seeing entries from our admissions application that amount to spam. Currently I only have one honeypot applied to thwart the spam bots, but these ...
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Using + for email addresses to find out who is selling your data: is it naive or is it effective?
It's pretty common among security-minded folks to fill in addresses using e.g. [email protected] when disclosing their email address to company so that they can tell if company has sold their ...
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How does the Yahoo webmail exploit work?
I got an email (referring to me by name) from somebody I knew a while ago and the email itself was just two/three lines containing a bit-ly link. Although it seemed like it actually could be ...
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A "new domain registration" spam?
About 6 days ago I purchased a new domain under .org TLD from a local registrar.
Few days later, I have received this strange message (which BTW fell to
Gmail spam bin), which looks like some kind of ...
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How can I have received this email?
I usually delete SPAM, but this email caught my attention:
As you can see, in "To:" field there is spammer account, but I thought: it's not important, in message header there must be some hidden "for"...
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Spam link returns empty redirect to google.com - am I missing something?
In this question someone received what was clearly a spam link. Sometimes I'm curious enough to take a peek, which I usually do with curl or other command line tools (less risk of drive-by malware, ...
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Clicked link in faked email
Backstory
So 3 weeks ago I received an email from Microsoft Imagine, requesting me, as a student, to update my profile on their website because they recently had changed from dreamspark.
That ...
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What kind of loophole are spam messages, containing just a few words and no links, trying to exploit?
I recently built a website using Django. It has a contact form and some minimal pages about me and my work portfolio. I have been getting a few spam messages a day and their content intrigues me (...
