Email Safety, Childish Forum Users, and You!

Chicago Dog

Well-known member
A word of warning for those of you who keep your professional email addresses easily accessible through public forums:

Yesterday, I was the victim of a mailing list spoofing attack. During the attack, the mailing list that was used in the spoof detected what was happening and sent me this warning:

Due to the protocols used on the Internet for mail delivery, it is extremely easy for a malicious user to forge an electronic mail message from another user. This vulnerability has led to a practice known as "spoofing" in list owner jargon, through which an innocent user is subscribed to thousands of mailing lists with the intent of filling up his mailbox and rendering his Internet account essentially useless. This is usually done in retribution for having posted something on a public forum which made the perpetrator lose face.
A member of this forum launched a mailing list spoof attack on my chicago.dog@hotmail.com account because he didn't like my opinions. Discovering the "assailant" was incredibly easy. How I verified it will be quite embarrassing to him.

I'm not saying you should censor your own feelings or opinions on the forum because you're worried about repercussions from an unstable member: open opinion and discussion is what makes this forum such a worthwhile tool.

Instead, take some initiative. Make sure your email accounts can handle spam. Some website hosting solutions offer varying levels of spam protection, but require you to decide what level to use! Make sure your accounts are up-to-date and protected. I'm lucky in the fact that my account is only registered for forum use, not for a professional resource. Even if my free Hotmail account were to succumb to such an attack, it wouldn't hurt my professional life.

However, I've seen people lose work because of antics like this. From research on the issue, I've found that tracing the attack back to the attacker is easy (unless your attacker is dumb enough to leave obvious clues, in which case, you can figure it out yourself like I did).

Rather than deal with all that, just try to keep your security up-to-date!
 
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