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Spammers
Harvest Email Addresses
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| A friend recently sent me
an email petition. The letter showed the addresses of
many other recipients. What she didn't know was that she could have been accidentally giving out
our email addresses to spammers. |
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Chain letter senders may
be inadvertently sending email addresses to spammers.
This
quote is from the Hoaxbuster pages of the Department of Energy’s CIAC site.
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“The
mission of CIAC is to apply cybersecurity expertise to prevent, detect, react to
and recover from cyber incidents for the U.S. DOE and other national
stakeholders.”
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The
following is a quote from CIAC:
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBHoaxInfo.html#risk
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“Recently,
we have been hearing of spammers (bulk mailers of unsolicited mail) harvesting
e-mail addresses from hoaxes and chain letters. After a few generations, many of
these letters contain hundreds of good addresses, which is just what the
spammers want. We have also heard rumors that spammers are deliberately starting
hoaxes and chain letters to gather e-mail addresses (of course, that could be a
hoax). So now, all those nice
people who were so worried about the poor little girl dying of cancer find
themselves not only laughed at for passing on a hoax but also the recipients of
tons of spam mail.”
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The
moral of this story is that any emails sent to a list should include addresses
as blind copies so that each recipient does not know the name of other
recipients. Also, the
addresses of prior recipients should be deleted from the email.
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| Urban
Legend Links |
| http://www.ulrc.com.au/ |
| http://urbanlegends.about.com/ |
| http://www.urbanlegends.com/ |
| http://www.snopes.com/ |
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| Gloria |
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LONDON