[thelist] Serious antispam measures

Ken Schaefer ken at adOpenStatic.com
Tue Apr 20 08:40:38 CDT 2004


You'd need some application running on your local machine to search through
your local address book, e.g. a virus or trojan. Alternatively, some trojans
to attempt to seek out shared folders, and propogate themselves across a
network. So it's possible for a trojan to seek out network shares, and scan
those for address books as well.

Also, your enterprise may have a centralised address book (a Global Address
List or similar). It may be possible for a virus/trojan to query that using
your user credentials. I don't know of any that have this capability, but
it's certainly not impossible.

Spambots, as typically defined, fetch webpages using HTTP, and analyse the
HTML for email addresses. So, your email application's local address book
isn't vulnerable, since you can't fetch it via HTTP (unless you've placed it
onto a website someplace!)

HTH

Cheers
Ken

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: "Diane Soini" <dianesoini at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [thelist] Serious antispam measures


: I'm curious how spam bots search addresses in individual's address
: books. Is it only by way of viruses? Or are they able to search your
: address book in some other way?
:
: My mail program does a decent job of filtering spam and sending it
: directly to my junk box, but what I resent is receiving it in the first
: place. I'm glad I have a high-speed connection, but if I didn't it
: would take forever to download all this junk. I guess I should see if I
: can stop it at the server so I don't have to see it on my laptop.
:
: Diane
: On Monday, April 19, 2004, at 01:20 AM, thelist-request at lists.evolt.org
: wrote:
: > Now spam bots search for addresses on individuals' address books etc.,
: > so requiring a certain address is no good any more. (my 'date for
: > address' approach offers too little help to this, for too high a
: > price, it's not good). Current spam bots are limited to scanning
: > addresses, they don't scan subjects or message bodies, so for now it
: > is sufficient to require something to be added in the subject.



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