E-mail Emergency

[Ambassador]

Pete - Forum users email addresses have been stolen!

I just got all this spam, 15 messages in total.  Usually, I would have thought that this was regular spam but I noticed the email addresses it was from, DAttrell@aol.com and kdryan1@yahoo.com.  I have never contacted Hager and Pippin by email before.  Both their email addresses are in there profiles here.  This makes me think that a worm/hacker stole addresses from simviation.  Another thing to note:  The spam was sent to the address I registered with, not the address that is in my profile.  The email address I registered with is not a free email address (like yahoo or hotmail), but an address I pay for.  Just thought I would let you now.  Hope you can do something about it.

[ozzy72]

Canadian Romulus has posted a thread about this in the General Discussion forum with a patch you can download. A lot of users have been hit with this, even me! Although my machine is clean, and it appears to be my ISP!!!!

Ozzy

[pete]

The addresses on this forum are unreadable unless you have admin access to the server & access to this is only by a 3 billion combination password. Even then they are stored in separate user data files which are virtually impossible to harvest. In addition to this all accesses are logged & reported daily - there have been no accesses exept by me.

There are many other possibilities & 1million ways to get emails but I can be 99.99% sure that these did not come from this forum data files.

I get virus's every day 'from' everyone - from microsoft - doug - all FS sites I know of - yahoo - google - cnn - .mil - harvard - .... you name it the virus & spam criminals use it.

[Craig.]

the addresses are stolen from the address book of a person with an infected computer. It then sends out more emails with those addresses without ever having to infect that users computer. This is why its such a dangerous problem.

[ozzy72]

An excellent reason not to have an address book on your PC. I keep all my email addresses for people on postcards at home!!!!

[pete]

I'm also getting them from non existant & never existant addresses such as 'staff@simviation.com', 'admin@simv ..', 'sales@simv...', etc ....


.... wonder how that has come about? Obviously not taken from an address book.....  ???

[Craig.]

mass mailing program perhaps?