{"id":158743,"date":"2016-04-17T18:54:29","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T16:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=158743"},"modified":"2016-04-17T18:55:29","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T16:55:29","slug":"how-spammers-get-your-email-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/158743-how-spammers-get-your-email-address.html","title":{"rendered":"How spammers get your email address"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Unsolicited bulk email &#8211; known as spam &#8211; clogs up people\u2019s inboxes and wastes a lot of bandwidth and resources.<\/p>\n<p>ISPA said that spam is bad because users are forced to pay to download content they didn\u2019t ask to receive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile ISPs bear the bulk of the cost for bandwidth overuse by spammers, this cost is often passed on to the consumer through increased Internet access fees or degraded service levels,\u201d said ISPA.<\/p>\n<p>But\u00a0where do\u00a0spammers get target\u00a0email address, especially if users\u00a0have never signed up for newsletters or other dubious services?<\/p>\n<p>The answer is that email addresses can be obtained from many sources, including email address resellers and leaked lists. Methods include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Website scraping<\/strong> \u2013 Spammers use tools to scan websites for email addresses, and collect these addresses for later use.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Calculated guesses<\/strong> \u2013 Spammers use tools to combine common names with popular domain names (like jan@gmail.com or susan@hotmail.com).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Brute force an SMTP server<\/strong> \u2013 Spammers can brute force an SMTP server, trying common names for people and well-known accounts.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Setting up email capturing services<\/strong> \u2013 Spammers set up fake services to &#8220;subscribe to&#8221; or \u201cunsubscribe online services\u201d which capture your email address.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Stealing contact lists<\/strong> &#8211; Cybercriminals can steal contact lists from your friends, or trick them to give out this information.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Buying email lists<\/strong> \u2013 There are many email address resellers, which sell millions of email addresses to spammers or companies trying to promote their products.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Hacked websites<\/strong> \u2013 Many websites collect their users\u2019 personal details, including email addresses. If these websites are compromised, the hackers can get access to the database where the email addresses are stored.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Leaked account databases<\/strong> \u2013 Employees with access to large user databases can leak this information, which includes email addresses.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Malware<\/strong> \u2013 Malware on a website or on someone\u2019s computer can harvest email addresses.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">What the South African law says about spam<\/h3>\n<p>ISPA\u2019s Ant Brooks said that in terms of the law in South Africa, spamming is technically not illegal.<\/p>\n<p>Current legislation says:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>ECT Act:<\/strong> You must have an unsubscribe option, and you can&#8217;t spam someone who tells you to stop.<\/li>\n<li><strong>CPA:<\/strong> You must honour the (theoretical, because it doesn&#8217;t exist) national opt-out database, and you can&#8217;t charge anyone for opting out.<\/li>\n<li><strong>POPI:<\/strong> You cannot share or sell someone&#8217;s details without their permission. This would probably be the most powerful anti-spam protection currently available, except that POPI is not yet in effect.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">How to protect against spammers harvesting your email address<\/h3>\n<p>While it is impossible to stop your email address from potentially\u00a0landing up in a spam list, you can take steps to minimize the risk of it happening.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Keep your email private<\/strong> \u2013 Never publish your email address on websites or other public places, and never use it to sign up for services which you do not know well.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Use a disposable email address<\/strong> \u2013 If you want to gain access to an online resource which requires an email address, but do not trust the source, use a disposable email address.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Be careful to unsubscribe<\/strong> \u2013 Do not click on an unsubscribe link from spam messages or newsletters which you do not know.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Use an email address encoding tool<\/strong> \u2013 If you have to publish your email address on your website\u2019s contact page, use an email address encoding tool to hide it from web scrapers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">More information about spam<\/h3>\n<p>The <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ispa.org.za\/spam\/\" target=\"_blank\">ISPA spam section<\/a><\/strong> is an excellent resource for fighting spam,\u00a0and contains a list of <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ispa.org.za\/spam\/hall-of-shame\/\" target=\"_blank\">spammers and address resellers<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">More on spam<\/h3>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/155639-how-to-fight-back-against-sms-spammers-and-sales-agents.html\">How to fight back against SMS spammers and sales agents<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/155635-how-sms-spammers-and-sales-agents-get-your-number.html\">How SMS spammers and sales agents get your number<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/smartphones\/136828-spam-sms-why-south-africans-pay-to-reply-stop.html\">Spam SMS \u2013 why South Africans pay to reply \u201cStop\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are many ways spammers can get hold of your email address, and in South Africa spamming is technically not illegal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":81761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[35,459,415],"class_list":["post-158743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-headline","tag-ispa","tag-spam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158743"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159472,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158743\/revisions\/159472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}