[Ansteorra] URGENT WARNING - Possible hacking or abuse of acceps contact emails

Haraldr Bassi ansteorra at haraldr.drakkar.org
Wed Aug 3 07:42:58 PDT 2011


I consider that the least likely scenario, or else I'd be getting messages to other addresses as 
well. Most (perhaps all) of the harvesting tools don't know what to do with Thunderbird on a Mac 
or Linux box, the only two systems I use for email access. There is no way that a harvester 
would have selected only one of at least 2000 addresses that I have used if they had access to 
my own system.

I too do something like this for a living :)

Haraldr

On 8/3/11 8:26 AM, mikea wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 06:28:01PM -0500, Haraldr Bassi wrote:
>> It is indeed possible that the address was harvested outside of the acceps
>> system, but the only place that address, which has acceps as part of the
>> email address, was ever used was in acceps and it would only have been
>> emailed inside of a spreadsheet to event stewards or exchequers. Not as
>> likely to have been harvested from a spreadsheet as from a Database
>> compromise or some other place. Don't know that I've ever emailed anyone
>> from that address, but it is possible that it ended up in someone's email
>> address book to be harvested.
>
> The most probable scenario that I see, Haraldr, is that somehow you wound
> up with something running on your system which dumped your addressbook or
> your sent mail to an external machine not controlled by you.
>
> These Things Happen; and we can't always find out how. On one of the
> lists I subscribe to, various folks with immense security expertise
> (heads of mail and security for Fortune 100 corporations) have voiced
> identical concerns about some of their own 1-purpose-only addresses.
>
> Yes, I work with this sort of thing for a living.
>



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