Telkom internet give out your Email.

[bboy]

So i'm busy looking at my old documentation with my username and passwords on from about a year ago when i signed up with telkom internet. I notice i have a pop3 account with them, never used it , never knew it existed, so i decided to plug the details into my mail client and see if telkom have ever emailed me anything, click send and receive and bam.... few thousand spam emails.

Now how the hell does my email address ******@telkomsa.whatever end up being public? I've never ever once used it, I never even knew it existed until yesterday.

 

[milomak]

is the ***** part a common combination? It's not outside the realm of possibilty that Telkom's anti-spam filter is crap. Just adding another possibility, although it effectively amounts to the same thing. I would check mine if I could remember the for format of the username.

EDIT: Figured out how to get in and the only things there were maintenance reports. Got DSL in April of this year.

 

[stoke]

Somebody slipped a desk jockey R100 and got the entire email address listing.

 

[bwana]

Vodacom did the same to me and my email address was a hodge-podge of letters and numbers.

 

[Tux]

My email adress consisting of an alphanumerical string as well yet still getting spam on it thanks to telscum

 

[bwana]

My email adress consisting of an alphanumerical string as well yet still getting spam on it thanks to telscum

Like stoke pointed out - the weakest link in any chain is probably going to be the poor schmo they pay the least.

 

[bboy]

mine is a bunch of letters, bastards

 

[CathJ]

Or maybe spammers are just generating random addresses, some of which happen to exist?

 

[gregmcc]

Could be - sometimes spammers do a dictionary or brute force attack to try and get valid email addresses. One night they hit us - on our mail logs there was [email protected] and it went up to [email protected] - a couple thousand of mail spams.

 

[ambo]

Could be - sometimes spammers do a dictionary or brute force attack to try and get valid email addresses. One night they hit us - on our mail logs there was [email protected] and it went up to [email protected] - a couple thousand of mail spams.

Thats usually referred to as a dictionary attack (although they didn't exactly use the dictionary in your case be the look of things)

There are standard configs for most mail server flavours that will prevent this from getting out of hand. Usually blacklisting an IP after x number of attempts to send mail to invalid addresses.

But it is possible for spammers to 'query' a server with a weak front line filter and remember all the addresses that passed and creating email address lists that way.

If you have a catch-all mailbox setup then obviously any address would appear valid. And after a while you start getting JoeJob'ed on hundreds of randomly generated addresses. Enter stage left SPF