My husband received one of these in his personal email, from a friend
who was "stranded in London" as well.
Tracy McCowan
On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Johnston, Leslie <lesliej_at_loc.gov> wrote:
> Actually, I do know someone whose gmail was hijacked and these messages were sent to everyone in his gmail address book. He found out when his wife, who was seated next to him in the car, received a message saying he was stranded in London. When he got back in to gmail, everything in his inbox had been deleted.
>
> Leslie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Alexander Johannesen
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2010 3:01 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] VERY SAD NEWS.............
>
>> This is a scam. I have also received emails identical to this one
>> (with a different person's name). The person's email has been hijacked.
>
> Relax, folks. There's no hacking, no hijacking, no nefarious technical implosion of volatile viruses, or anything like that. These mails are bulk emails sent with an altered mail-to: address or more complex DNS spoofing (some hacking needed on poor mail servers, but more doubtfully the source here) to harvested email contexts (so Sue's original "message" to a list she is part of), probably to either a) fool stop-words based email filtering, and / or b) overflow various Bayesian spam filters. The wordings in the email is the key, and quite cleverly done, with certain words in certain contexts. What they're hoping to achieve is a reduced guard against certain spam so that later better spam (or spam-based injection attacks) can get through.
>
> Ignore at will. Some have said they're best to avoid being marked as spam, teaching certain systems to screw up their filtering, but I'm not so sure, and if you're using such a system it's a good reminder to reevaluate it. :)
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
> --
> Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
> --- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ----------------------------------------------
> ------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---
>
Received on Mon Nov 22 2010 - 17:41:36 EST