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 ...
- 7,858
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 ...
- 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, "...
- 1,210
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 ...
- 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 ...
- 739
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 ...
- 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, ...
- 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 ...
- 19.2k
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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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
...
- 198k
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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 3,376
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 ...
- 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
...
18
votes
How did I get this email without a "To" field?
So far I think that your address was used as BCC.
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 26.4k
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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- 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 "...
- 128k
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