[ale] Those "You've been hacked" emails

[dev null zero two]

99% chance it's sent from a compromised server.

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 11:56 PM Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I got a raft of them sent to my personal server from various hacked
> machines.  A bunch in Brazil, one at Digital Ocean, another at Amazon
> EC2.  In my case they always wrote the from and to to be the same
> address so I added another ACL to the mail server to block anything that
> came from the outside and claimed to be from me and to me.  It all went
> away after that.
>
> Of course these started showing up long after I had already been
> blocking entire netblocks for abuse (hundreds of relay attempts per
> minute) so I may have already been ignoring some sources.
>
> On 2019-03-24 19:39, Ben Coleman via Ale wrote:
> > I'm sure you've gotten them - those emails claiming that they've hacked
> > you, and have video evidence of you activities while you're (ehem)
> > interacting with certain sites, and that this evidence can all go away
> > if you'll only deposit a certain amount of money into their bitcoin
> > account.  The latest tack they've been taking is to combine your email
> > with those caches of passwords from various exploits so they can appear
> > to know your passwords (yeah, one I used 10 years ago).
> >
> > But what I didn't realize was how inexperienced (at least some of) these
> > guys are at the actual spamming game.  On a whim, I popped up the
> > headers for one of these (I've been amused before on how, for example,
> > some of these claim to have included a 'tracking pixel' on what is
> > actually a text/plain email).  To my surprise, there was but one
> > Received header.  Straight from their server to mine (well, they did try
> > to spoof the HELO to look like it was an outlook mail server, but if you
> > know anything about Received headers, you know to ignore that).  No
> > obfuscation of the headers at all.  And it was in the network of a VPS
> > vendor.  Now, it's possible that someone's had their VPS hacked, but
> > since this whole faux extortion thing is really script-kiddie level
> > stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if someone was stupid enough to send this
> > stuff out from their own VPS.
> >
> > I felt transported back to the early 2000s when it was actually useful
> > to read Received headers, figure out where an email came from (even if
> > the spammer tried to inject bogus Received headers), and report it to
> > their ISP, with results (usually the spammer account shut down - I've
> > got my share of "positive" results, including one from Afterburner (for
> > those who remember him)).  Those days pretty much went away when the
> > spammers joined up with the botnet crowd.
> >
> > So, I sent off a report to the VPS vendor's abuse account.  And went and
> > found another that originated off of an Amazon EC2 and shot off a report
> > to Amazon's abuse account.  Don't know yet if this will do any good.
> > But if any other ALEers have a nostalgic spot for the early
> > antispamming days, this may be a place where you can play again.
> >
> > Ben
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
-- 
Sent from my mobile. Please excuse the brevity, spelling, and punctuation.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20190324/5f0f1df3/attachment.html>