Now that Geocities closed it’s doors, (more missed by spammers than actual users no doubt) Zoomshare has stepped up to welcome the spamming clientele.
From their homepage:
Welcome Former GeoCities Customers!
Zoomshare: Providing Free Sites Since 2004
While there’s no doubt legitimate users, Zoomeshare doesn’t appear to have any better spam/abuse management than did Geocities.
The short answer is yes. Anyone can forge the sender (From) field of an email and have it claim to be coming from pretty much any address they want.
At first glance you might think “That’s horrible, why do we allow that to happen?” The truth is that it’s rather common, and you might even do this yourself, though for entirely innocent reasons.
In what seems to be a weekly rotation, we’re now seeing an uptick in fraudulent IRS Refund Phishing emails.
Typical subjects for this scam include:
IRS Refund Fraud
A new Phishing scam is making the rounds, targeting AOL’s Instant Messenger users and attempting to trick them into sharing their AIM login username and passwords.
Emails are currently making the rounds with subject lines like:
Shortly after posting about the UPS virus emails, we now see the virus attack campaign has morphed into a DHL version of the same virus attachment routine.
Just in case anyone is confused about the latest round of emails claiming to now be coming from DHL, let’s make it clear that if they contain an EXE and a ZIP attachment then they’re viruses.
Subject lines for this campaign are fairly similar, with a randomized number tacked onto the end to help avoid simplistic spam filters:
By default, email client software programs will delete all messages from your mail server right after downloading them. This means that when you click “Get New Messages” or “Check Mail” (or whatever you do to see if you have any new messages) your email client connects to the server where your mailbox account resides and copies all of the messages from the server to your computer. When it finishes, it removes the messages from the server so that the only copies of the messages are the ones downloaded to your computer (or phone or PDA if that’s what you used to check mail).
If you or anyone in your organization is confused about the latest round of emails claiming to be from UPS concerning delivery notices, let’s make it clear that if they contain an EXE and a ZIP attachment then they’re most certainly viruses.
Subject lines for this latest campaign are fairly similar, with a randomized number tacked onto the end to help avoid simplistic spam filters:
Understanding the basics of how email works can make life a lot easier for any email user. Especially those who are interested in using email effectively. In this post we’ll cover the basics that every user should know.
