[ILUG] hey wassup ILuG ;)

[Caolan McNamara]

On 04-Nov-99 Robert Sweetnam wrote:
>Out of curiosity, How did your name get attached to it???
>just worried incase something similar could happen to me or anyone else for
>that matter.

Dunno really, looks like it is looking through peoples address books or
received mail and then sending a mail based on its findings pretending to
be the person in the addressbook to the place that the mail came from, So 
seeing as this was was send from "me" to ilug I imagine that it is very likely
to happen to someone else, and maybe to the same forum. I also got one myself
earlier on today from some yahoo address, one a few days ago from someone else
and so on. You can also see a stack of postings to usenet groups with the same
style heading. In each case the mail is sent with the same text except the names
changed each time. The more mails you send the more trouble you are in, and im
a bit of a mail junky.

But for sure anyone can get hit by something like this, you can't guard against
the rest of the world having stupid mail hosts which accept insane from 
addresses such as "XFMail.981021181838.Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie", the server which
accepted the original message is at fault here, everyones mail server should 
only accept addresses which belong to them, not to be a good samaritan and 
take on face value whatever garbage shows up on their port.

Yes it can happen to you, and it certainly will at some stage, the only thing is
that if its a windows mail client macro virus, at least you won't be the *cause*
of it if you run a linux mail client.

C.

Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique strategy
(Organic) machinery