spamalot

A few days ago, I started getting at least 20 e-mails a day that have an attachment called account_info.zip which I assume is a virus. They’re all sent from different e-mail addresses. Does this sound familiar at all?

If not, does anyone know how I can put a stop to it?

I’m getting a lot of info@….. addresses and a lot of your message was returned. Also the info.zip

I hate to say it, but I think this might be somehow getting out from here since my friend Stacy has never got spam before and is now.

Eeeks!

Oh Shinji…..

I think we have the same problem. And this hasn’t happened to me before either. A lot of the e-mail addresses have Jewish words in them (mikvah.org, hazlacha.com, torahonline, chabad, etc), but there’s also lots of other random stuff from yahoo, hotmail, mit, you name it… I wonder if it has anything to do with which web sites I’ve been browsing lately or else who has been browsing mine? Is this what you guys are experiencing?

Hey there — ach, hate to hear about anyone getting spam. We definitely have measures in place to prevent anyone from obtaining email addresses from Lightstalkers. Here’s how we roll:

There’s such a thing as spam “crawlers”, which go through public Web sites and parse out email addresses. To protect you, we have always “munged” email addresses in a semi-random way. (That means scrambling and re-encoding the letters and numbers. The end result is that it’s still readable to the human eye, but what software sees — the actual code inside the page — is an unpatterned string of encoded character entities.)

However, and although I’m certain that no one has been able to get your email address from the site, we’re going to implement additional security measures immediately. From now on, your profile email address is only visible to members of your “Inner Circle”, which you can manage via the Organize page. Only specific people you know, trust, and choose can gain access to that info.

I’m sure this is unnecessary, but I want you to know that you can trust us to take these issues very seriously.

In addition to “crawling”, there’s another big problem these days: spyware. This is software which can sometimes be surrepticiously installed on your computer, records your activity, and sends the info back to wherever (hell, I’m pretty sure).* This is a big problem, because spyware can theoretically have access to anything you have access to, including signed-in pages at Lightstalkers.

To fight this, we continue to munge email addresses, even if you’re actually logged in. So even the stuff you’re allowed to see has anti-spam measures in place.

And of course, we don’t sell, share, or exchange any kind of personal data — email or otherwise.

Lastly, definitely let us know what you find out. You can always forward samples of what you’re seeing to support@lightstalkers.org.

• If you use a PC and have ever installed file-sharing software, you should check yourself out for spyware, for sure. Spyware isn’t a problem on Macs, as far as I know.

I have also gotten a wave of spam but not to my LS email address, instead to my personal earthlink account. Since then, I have raised the spam blocker on my earthlink account to HIGH and it’s been successful at catching most SPAM and viruses.
Apparently anytime you receive a mass email with your address visible in the group list, you are vulnerable to scavengers scrolling the web for unsuspecting bystanders. Your address is then shuffled around to various lists…