At 16:04 8/01/02 +1300, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 01:44:27PM +1100, Kefyn Judson (ENZ) wrote:
Have you had many of the online site email addresses leaked?
No, not so far... it seems then it's likely most address harvesting is done via Usenet (probably not so common) and by using spiders to walk online HTTP mailing list archives such as this one. But without hard facts this is pure speculation.
I've had spam come to two addresses which are only listed as a contact address on our website (eg, its an alias that redirects to me, not an address I ever post with) so from that I can only assume that some spammers DO use some kind of web page scanning email address harvester. Fortunately I only received a few pieces of spam to those addresses, and they seem to have stopped for now... Another thing that occured to me is perhaps one of the current self-sending internet worms is actually a secret email address harvester that sends copies of the email address of all computers it infects, *and* their address books to some nefarious address collector. I understand that some email worms also check your internet explorer cache for email addresses seen on recently visited web pages as well, so the potential to extract valid email addresses with a method like that is truly scary. Regards, Simon - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog