Hot answers tagged

184 votes

Received a set of SMS/MMS containing 2 photos, a voice message, and a text "I need help" with Google Maps link from a known contact. Is it spam?

This does not seem to be a virus. It is a panic function in some android phones, that allows to send these messages in case you are kidnapped or otherwise in danger by pressing the power button 3 ...
Peter Harmann's user avatar
109 votes
Accepted

Received a set of SMS/MMS containing 2 photos, a voice message, and a text "I need help" with Google Maps link from a known contact. Is it spam?

This is an exact description of the panic feature built into phones as Peter Harmann already said. Anecdotally I can tell you on my previous Samsung smartphone, I could trigger this exact feature by ...
Kallmanation's user avatar
  • 1,736
97 votes
Accepted

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

There was a psychology experiment where two groups of homeowners went door-to-door and asked, ironically, for people to consent to display a large and ugly sign in their yard that said some form of, "...
Christos Hayward's user avatar
87 votes
Accepted

How did I get this email without a "To" field?

Why? Two explanations: BCC Spam I've often gotten spam where they seem to want to hide to whom it was addressed for some reason. Since I have a catch-all on my domain, it will arrive for me no ...
Luc's user avatar
  • 32.7k
59 votes

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

What I miss in the other answers is that an image may contain extremely useful information about you. A jpg contains blocks like the EXIF metadata (here in IrfanView): and even more interesting, the ...
Thorsten S.'s user avatar
45 votes

Browser is accepting italic/bold Unicode as part of SPAM email's URL

Previous answers both tell part of the story here, but there's a few different aspects to understand. Firstly, why do these code points exist? Unicode has the ambition to replace all previous ways of ...
IMSoP's user avatar
  • 3,860
39 votes
Accepted

How can I get more spam for my honeypot?

Spammers will "scrape" the internet for email addresses and use programs to collect millions of addresses. Or just download them. If you want your email address to be picked up by spammers, ...
schroeder's user avatar
  • 128k
37 votes

I receive spam despite a captcha, has my wordpress blog been hacked?

Posting spam doesn't require hacking in any ways. Regarding the captcha, there is two possibilities: Either the captcha is automatable (I don't know for your website, but I still encounter a lot of ...
WhiteWinterWolf's user avatar
36 votes
Accepted

Getting spam calls from numbers similar to my own

The telephone system has been designed so that a caller can replace their phone number with a fake, and some unscrupulous companies use this to change their number to appear to be local to the person ...
GdD's user avatar
  • 17.4k
36 votes

How did I get this email without a "To" field?

Headers like To, Cc and From are essentially all cosmetic; they don't control the actual receipients or senders of an email according to the SMTP protocol. It's possible to put whatever you like into ...
thomasrutter's user avatar
  • 1,608
31 votes

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

There are so many potential things that could be happening here. The attacker may try phishing by having you click a malicious link which containing malware such as keyloggers or similar. The attacker ...
Paul's user avatar
  • 1,552
28 votes

How did this email list a fake recipient?

When mail is sent via SMTP, there are two separate places this sort of information goes, the Envelope (things that are set with SMTP commands) and the Header (the first block of text under the SMTP ...
gowenfawr's user avatar
  • 72.7k
27 votes

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

He may not be trying to get an image, but your confidence. That is why he/she sent his/her (most likely false) picture. Its social engineering at its best. In the future he/she may ask you to click ...
nsn's user avatar
  • 726
26 votes
Accepted

Browser is accepting italic/bold Unicode as part of SPAM email's URL

What you have here are mathematical symbols, see output from unicode text analyzer: Browser Codepoint Name # Fonts Script 𝙪 U+1D66A MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC SMALL U 12 Common 𝙯 U+1D66F ...
Steffen Ullrich's user avatar
26 votes

Is email scraping still a thing for spammers

Scraping is still a technique spammers use to harvest victim addresses, but as there are far more methods today than there were a dozen+ years ago, scraping is no longer the primary mechanism to find ...
Adam Katz's user avatar
  • 11k
22 votes
Accepted

Email unsubscribe handling security

This is a good example for a case where usability and security do not go hand in hand. A user wants usability: They want to be able to click the link and be unsubscribed. They want this to always work ...
tim's user avatar
  • 29.5k
20 votes

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

I just want to add sexting to the list. They gain your confidence, you start exchanging pictures, innocent at first but getting racier ("she" will do the same, of course), at some point maybe even ...
vic's user avatar
  • 536
20 votes

How can I get more spam for my honeypot?

Besides the other good answers, I suggest setting up a catch-all email address. You'll find that a lot of spam goes to info@, webmaster@, postmaster@, abuse@ and so on. This typically requires that ...
Thomas Weller's user avatar
18 votes

Getting spam calls from numbers similar to my own

As GdD said, it's CallerID spoofing with the hope of tricking you into answering a 'local' call. I've had this happen where they used my own number as the Caller ID number! I answered because I ...
John Deters's user avatar
  • 34.1k
18 votes

How are spammers using LinkedIn "http://linkedin.com/slink?code=..." URLs?

So I just stumbled upon this today and got a similar message: https://www.linkedin.com/slink?code=eiurEkp?61778=myname First I tried the first part: https://www.linkedin.com/slink?code=eiurEkp ...
Sebastian G. Marinescu's user avatar
18 votes

How did I get this email without a "To" field?

So far I think that your address was used as BCC.
Mirsad's user avatar
  • 10.2k
17 votes

I receive spam despite a captcha, has my wordpress blog been hacked?

It's unlikely he's hacked into your site. It's also unlikely he's doing this manually. If you run a Wordpress site, bots will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. Captcha resolution can ...
Ivan's user avatar
  • 6,338
16 votes
Accepted

What is this Russian calendar reminder that popped up?

It appears to be this: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/06/22/google-calendar-phising-scam/ Scammers are exploiting [Google] Calendar['s] default setting, which automatically adds invites to your ...
Luc's user avatar
  • 32.7k
15 votes

How did I get this email without a "To" field?

It can be surprising, but this is quite normal in the SMTP protocol. A message is composed of headers and a body. It is send over a chain of Mail Transport Agents. No agent should change the body, but ...
Serge Ballesta's user avatar
14 votes
Accepted

What is the point of an attack using spam without any URL or attached file

It's a Nigerian email scam (as @Sravan commented). If you contact that email the scammer will promise you a lot of money and ask for a small fee for document copies, then a little more for document ...
ThoriumBR's user avatar
  • 53.5k
13 votes
Accepted

Got a spam mail with an htm attachment, is the script harmful?

What is it? I decoded your "garbage." This is base64 encoding, and is far too large to place here. Here's the decoded result: http://pastebin.com/NBV4iY2s This seems to be an attachment of login ...
Mark Buffalo's user avatar
  • 22.6k
12 votes

Why would a spammer try to get a (normal) image of mine?

This sounds like someone wanting to create real-looking "fake" profiles on social media like facebook, and searches for easy-to-digest input. This is a real industry, as for example this report from ...
Marcel's user avatar
  • 4,066
12 votes

How can you prevent email addresses from being harvested from a registration form?

The email harvesting scenario you describe is really slow and not likely to happen, at least as a way to gather lots of email addresses. The attacker would need to brute force really long strings ...
AdHominem's user avatar
  • 3,026
12 votes

How can I get more spam for my honeypot?

I have been using unique email addresses for each site and service for the past 15 years. So a simple grep lets me calculate how much spam is coming to each address. While anecdotal and only ...
jpa's user avatar
  • 1,240
12 votes

Is email scraping still a thing for spammers

It is possible for automated scripts to find a site almost immediately. But it can also take a while. As someone who ran honeypots for a long time, it was frustrating how long it could take to "...
schroeder's user avatar
  • 128k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible