Re: shadow spam (was Re: stop your mail)

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Fungi4All wrote:
> I remember 2 months ago I had received a response from what appeared
> as a list member responding to some spam that was sent by me to the list.

The first thing i checked on the current spam was that it is really
distributed by the list and not sent to me directly.
"Received:" headers like this one can be trusted if no other such headers
were added by my provider gmx.net:

  Received: from bendel.debian.org ([82.195.75.100]) by mx-ha.gmx.net
            (mxgmx016 [212.227.15.9]) [...] for <scdbackup@gmx.net>;
            Sun, 09 Jul 2017 11:51:20 +0200

(Of course anybody could add such a header to the mail when it gets
 sent. But then gmx.net would still add its own "Received:" header,)


> this conversation has gone viral itself.

It is technically interesting to see what people think how stupid we
are. I wonder if there is any other purpose than to make me wonder ?

Maybe it's Happy Recursion Week ? GNU is Not Unix !
Or it's a Fnord, meant to trigger a sleeping brain worm.


Joel Rees wrote:
> (1) These messages may be a sort of generator for phishing targets.

You mean that those who hit the "Smack Sender" button of their mail
app show up as flotsam here and can be harvested without reveiling
the harvester's mail address ?
(This theory would imply that the reflector senders are real people
 or their watchdog apps.)

Eek. That would mean we would really have to take measures to not
let appear most of the messages in subscriber mailboxes and archive.
If we let this continue then we create a commercial incentive to
flood us.


> they might be setting up a noise
> background against which to send steganographically encoded messages.

That's a good one.
We are testing ground for a novel low-bandwidth method to control
bot nets or remote spies.
Ten hops over iPads, Galaxies, or WinPhones would be nearly as
effective in hiding the sender as a Tor onion would be.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas