Re: A new twist on address trawling

Damien Miller (dmiller@vitnet.com.sg)
Thu, 30 Oct 1997 08:52:05 +1100 (EST)

On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Paul Bambury wrote:

> I'm interested in where & how spammers get e-mail addresses & checked
> out the URLs in your posted e-mail, but the site didn't make much sense
> to me. Maybe I'm a bit clueless but would you mind explaining what's
> going on with this site.

The attached email was a spam, its target address was trawled from the
Internic WHOIS database. It was only attached as an example.

> I've read Roger Clarke's material on spam & have been generally
> following the spam debate in the US so I understand that listservs such
> as Majordomo can deliver a list of subscribers with the command "whois",
> are you saying this conatactdata site is a meta-list of the subscribers
> of a number of listserv discussion groups?

The WHOIS database that I am referring to is maintained by the Internic,
it contains (among other things) infomration regarding domain names,
including contact email addresses forr responsible persons.

The spammers, armed with a list of domain names, queried this database and
stored the addresses for direct spamming.

> It looks like a service to list your URL on a list of links. I'm not
> sure why anyone would pay for this, there are pleny of free link lists
> around.

Spam doesn't have to be logical ;)

Regards,
Damien

| "... the most serious problems in the Internet have been caused by
| unenvisaged mechanisms triggered by low-probability events; mere human
| malice would never have taken so devious a course!" - RFC 1122
|
| WWW: http://silicon.vitnet.com.sg
| PGP public key: send me an email with "send file pgp_key" as the subject