Methods of spam
From Total Malware Info
Author: Vitaly Kiktenko, Virus Analyst.
It is a well known fact that purpose of many of the email worms today is finding email addresses on user’s computers to create databases to support spam industry. Usually worms scan for email addresses such places as windows address books, Outlook data files, files on the hard drive with following extensions “.htm”, “.html”, “.doc”, “.eml” and so on. Collected data is being sent to malefactor’s emails or uploaded to their web sites.
Email address mining using viruses and worms is usually uneffective because of Anti-Virus software installed on user’s machines that removes worms before they manage to find something or send a report. To overcome this disadvantage spam base creators use a new technique to collect addresses. It is like a dictionary bruteforce attack when cracking passwords. The idea is the following. When creating an account on the free email-server some people does not have fantasy to contrive an original email address, they create accounts with the names like “ann2007”, “tom26” and so on… We can find thousands of such accounts that our friends use.
When creating accounts many people use their names as a part of address, sometimes the names of the characters in favourite books… if someone will carry out a small research on how people often contrive nicks for themselves he will see that there are some words that are used very often. If we create a dictionary of such words we can try to do the following thing - create a spam delivery with automatically generated list of recipients like: “ann2001”, “ann2002”, “ann2003” and so on, and try to send it. Soon we will find out that some of the emails will not be delivered because addresses does not exist, but some of them will be, and if so – we can add the addresses to spam base.
The bad thing in such email discovery is that it is nothing you can do to keep your address private. The only advice can be - create an account with extraordinary user name so no one could ever think about that.
