The AM Forum

I have lately been getting some bizarre junk e-mail.  It comes from senders I have never heard of, and instead of the usual attempts to scam or sell some worthless junk, it is either gibberish or something  that appears  randomly cut out of context that makes absolutely no sense.

I can't figure out what the purpose of it is.  Here are a few examples:

From: "Kristin Rock" <UFournierr@falconrule.com>
Subj: Re: For drink in confederacy breach

prayer Early in the morning, I sauntered through the dear old tranquil


This is what I got when I clicked on "properties" to extract the internet headers for he above message:

Return-Path: <ULayz@afterhoursit.com>
Received: from mxsf26.cluster1.charter.net ([10.20.201.226])
          by mtao02.charter.net
          (InterMail vM.6.01.05.03 201-2131-123-103-20050825) with ESMTP
          id <20051106190423.MPEU15549.mtao02.charter.net@mxsf26.cluster1.charter.net>;
          Sun, 6 Nov 2005 14:04:23 -0500
Received: from mxip28a.cluster1.charter.net (mxip28a.cluster1.charter.net [209.225.28.187])
   by mxsf26.cluster1.charter.net (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id jA6J3xkQ028031;
   Sun, 6 Nov 2005 14:04:22 -0500
Received: from unknown.dct.al.charter.com ([68.191.137.181])
  by mxip28a.cluster1.charter.net with SMTP; 06 Nov 2005 14:04:05 -0500
X-IronPort-AV: i="3.97,298,1125892800";
   d="gif'147?scan'147,208,217,147"; a="431688601:sNHT47012198"
Received: from ZTPUHD (cdtt.falconrule.com[172.28.239.233])
   by iaxfiyj.falconrule.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 2E2I9A7705
   for <ruthmass@charter.net>; Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:03:19 -0800
   (envelope-from YPTIBJ@falconrule.com)
From: "Kristin Rock" <UFournierr@falconrule.com>
To: "Ruthmass" <ruthmass@charter.net>
Subject: Re: For drink in confederacy breach
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:03:19 -0800
Message-ID: <3936844416.691@falconrule.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
   boundary="--KLS59zoIHEsBxQuIQH"



Here's another one:

From: "Katelyn Pope" <Plnfvam@cavtel.net>
To: "Browneyes.0725" <browneyes.0725@charter.net>
Subject: Re: But watch in geology
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 15:51:45 -0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
   boundary="--9OCztndAZrbrIe9ZvJG0kJ"

saviour if he were waking, but with the same determined face.


Then there are some like this one that are TOTAL gibberish:

From: "Natasha" <aqgukrruqyz@fast.net>
To: (my e-mail address)
Subject: Angelina Jolie has a few


handmade wtch like rolx
u cant ask for better immitations

038.veryncetogtone.com


seuquqsokj woyxm lpoyiyle irs rv afgmecsimbegvok
ekovn tblcmrry iek tmkgkgsvs uxzqpnikiahi zybtilr
ihuchqd vao bxnvzpgro ajelmqauca osov qbpvnve


Does anyone else get this stuff, and does anyone know what the purpose of it is?

Some of the messages have attachments, but I am not stupid enough to open any of them.

It's crap to get past the spam filters.  And they're selling fake Rolex watches on their website.  Just delete them.

73 John

I get them too. Been doing so for a few months. I just delete and ignore email that I don't recognize anymore, and especially gibberish emails. I cannot believe anybody would actually click on those gibberish emails to read what they have on their website. They make no sense to me either.
John

I understand that stuff is epidemic now. I know many people who get these same emails that have a few sentances from some book out of context. The sender is always different.

I've been told that it's a cleanser for email spam services. It basically continues to verify a good adr. Then the real spam emails get sent. Funny, but I get maybe three of these bogus ones a day, but only about one real advertisement spam a day.

I was told that many people get up to 100+ spams a day... hard to believe, but true.

What a waste of valuable spectrum, huh?

T

I have an email account that was especially set up to attract Nigerian 419 scammers emails.  Since July I have received almost 3000.

An OUSTANDING free email service that has some special features to thwart this shit is fastmail.fm  - there's a feature called "bounce", somewhat like forward, but it bounces the email back to the sender with an error message.  A couple of bounces and you're off the spammer's mailing list.

There's no ads, no graphics garbage, or any slow BS like with hotmail or yahoo.  It is ideally suited if you're still on dialup.

Another cool feature is that it strips your IP address if you have reason to stay anonymous.

73 John

 ;D ;D ;D    So how you doing with bagging those lads?

I haven't been on the site in maybe four months.  You make any contacts?

BTW, besides signing someone's guest log, what have you done to attract so many 419 letters?

T

In case you haven't seen these 419 baiting websites.....


http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/index.html

http://419eater.com/index.htm

The junk text is just "noise" to try and confuse statistical spam filters. Fortunately in most cases it doesn't work..Which reminds me, it's time I fix my Bayesian spam filter.

The best baiting site, IMHO, is www.thescambaiter.com - the site owner there has sent washing machines and boxes of crap to Nigeria at the scammer's expense.  Also convinced a scammer to send pics with a rock tied to his nutsack  :-X

Search for the Cole freight baits and "Adebola the Animal Seller".

Tom, what I did was pose as a scammer and send my catcher email to a number of known 419ers as a hot prospect, to the effect of "boy dis maga pay big time".  Word gets around fast  ;)

I only get this random junk in my ISP account, and I use Outlook Express.  I have a MyWay account  and Hotmail account (both web-based) that I use for all my mailing lists and do most of my correspondence with the Hotmail account.  The Hotmail account is easy to use, especially with hams over the air, because all one has to remember is my  callsign @ hotmail.com.  Hotmail used to be notorious for SPAM (I was getting over 100 messages a day) but within the last year or so they have installed a very effective SPAM filter.  I now get maybe one or two a day, and occasionally I check the junk mail box, and hardly ever see a valid message  listed.

I must have sent my ISP e-mail address one time to the wrong party, because I used to never get SPAM in that account, but now get about a dozen a day.  I never get SPAM in the MyWay account, but I only use it to download an Astronomy newsletter that I subscribe to, and never send messages from that account.

I have Outlook Express set to "Block images and other external content in HTML e-mail".  I have  selected "plain text" as the Mail Sending Format.  I can't find a setting that would reject HTML e-mails outright, but when I receive one the messsage is in plain text with hyperlinks to  the image or other content, which I can manually click on, which opens through my browser.  Not sure I would want to reject HTML messages outright, since most of the ones I do receive are valid.  I turned off the preview image content upon opening the messsage because it would seem to me this could allow you to automatically download a virus.

Rarely, out of uncontrollable curiosity, I will check out the website listed in an especially bizarre SPAM message, but I never click directly on the link.  Instead I will copy the URL and paste it into Firefox. Sometimes Firefox refuses to open the site, but delivers an error message saying "...to protect your computer." I seldom if ever access porn sites anymore, because they are notorious for trojans and redirectors that can infect your machine by merely clicking on the questionable URL.  I have clicked on a few that, once accessed, I could not exit.  Whenever I clicked the "X" the site would simply reappear.  The only way I could exit it was by shutting down and restarting the computer. I find Firefox to be far better for handling this kind of shit than Internet Explorer, which I now use only on trusted websites, that won't work properly with Firefox.

I would  HIGHLY recommend installing a custom HOSTS file in your Windows folder.  I use Ad-Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy and the Micro$oft Antispyware beta, and I used to run a scan once a week, and would catch dozens of "data miners" and usually several registry entries.  After I installed the HOSTS file, I now usually find less than a  half dozen total after running all three programs, even if I go several weeks without a scan.  Also, the HOSTS file causes the computer to reject most banner ads.  Those used to make Hotmail a real pain in the bum to use, but now it's almost like using my ISP e-mail account.  With IE, I just get the little broken image icon where a banner ad is supposed to go. With Firefox, all I get as a blank space in place of the banner ad.

For a detailed explanation of what a custom HOSTS file is and how to install and use it, check out

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm  (http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm)

Enough of this boring old buzzard rant.  I suspect if I checked my blood pressure now, it would read elevated.

Grrrrrr  >:(  >:(

Up until recently I never got any spam but now I too get a lot of those non-sensical emails. 

I use a neat little program that resides on my machine called Mailwasher.  It does the same thing.  It allows me to preview any email prior to downloading from the server to my machines.  It previews it as text only. If I don't like it I can bounce it back to the sender making my address look like it's an invalid address.  It has spam filters and can be setup to run in auto mode to do auto bouncing once it "learns".  Unfortunately there are so many open email servers the list will be endless and it seems to be that way when I look at the blacklist Mailwasher is creating.  Someday I'll put this into auto mode to see how it works.

Here's my routine with Mailwasher and my email:
I setup my email client to receive email without automatically deleting it from the server.  Before retrieving email I start Mailwasher and review what is on the server.  If I don't like what I see it gets blacklisted and bounced. Mailwasher also provides the option of blacklisting an entire domain if you want which I do.  What I see and like I keep then download to my email client which is Mozillla Thunderbird.  It's a few extra steps for getting email but I find it satisfying to bounce email to the jerks that send me the crap I don't want.  I don't keep an address book in my email client in case I get mined.  I do keep a text based email address book in a text base file which I retrieve using Notepad.  It's a few extra steps to send an email but I know I can't get mined.

Comcast started with forwarding these type messages several months ago. I used to not have ANY most days, sometimes one or two, but then something changed at Comcast. I run Norton 2005 and Counterspy.
I never have problems other than these 'gibberish' messages. Maybe a dozen daily. I never open them (only preview in OE) but prior to deleting I f/w all of them to abuse@ and customerservice@ comcast.
Some one there has to delete them too!

Don, I googled your hotmail address and 5 or 6 entries came up.  That's why you're getting spam.  Any time you post your email address anywhere the automated email extractors will nab it and you;ll get all kinds of crap.

My direct email address doesn't google, and I get no spam at all.  ;D

73 John

The bizarre stuff is coming in on my ISP e-mail address.  It doesn't google.  I'm surprised the Hotmail address doesn't show more entries on google because I have used the same address since I first got online in 1997.  Some of those date back to the late 90's before SPAM got to be such a problem and people routinely posted their e-mail addresses publicly.  I used to have it on my callsign data on QRZ.com.  Right now, Hotmail's spam filter catches all but about half dozen messages a week.  I am not sure how spammers got my ISP address since I don't use it except for personal one-on-one communication with people I know.  I have used it to correspond with businesses regarding products that I have purchased, so one of them might have in their mailing list and sell their data base to spammers.

Some 'trojans' evidently report stuff back to the mother ship, which makes money by selling your credit card data, and even your e-mail address.  These blasted trojans are now doing something called "rootkit," and it takes control of your machine such that it will not report their existence.  There is even one that eludes detection in safe mode.  This crap will grab passwords, credit card data and who knows what, and send it all to the mother ship.  It's scary, and it's a pain in the ass.  There are so many exploits that I'm amazed any of us still have a credit rating.

Check this site if you want to get really paranoid about your computer:
http://isc.sans.org/

I have one suggestion. If you are concerned  about online security DON'T USE WINDOWS !!  Windows3x, Win 95/98, thru Windows XP are the most insecure and potentially vulnerable operating systems I know of. I have several Windows boxes here and I NEVER EVER use them for online transactions.  Preferably I use my Linux boxes which I have far better control over and which are not constantly targetted by every virus writer and rootkit writer under the sun.  Now sure, Linux is not 100% secure either. No system is. On ALL systems you should be running some sort of decent firewalling and making sure  that any ports that do not need to be open are not open. Exersize special care of you are running things like web servers, ftp, mail servers etc on standard ports.  In any event I will say this. Only once, several years ago,  was one of my Linux boxes ever attacked and rootkitted. That was quite long ago when i was still naive and not running any firewall protection. And even then I quickly noticed the problem and isolated it.  Since then I have not had a single security incident on any of my Linux machines. No trojans, no viruses, no spyware, no keystroke copiers, no nothing. Contrast that with my Windows boxes that are constantly being hit with trojans, spyware, spam , rootkit attempts, etc.  Matter of fact it's somewhat a breach of network security to even allow any Windows machines on my network.If I needed to run an extremely tight network I would probably dissalow Windows alltogether.

My advice, run Linux, run Unix, free BSD, BeOS, OS/2, etc when making online transactions. Heck, there is even a free version of Solaris out there. Or, if these choices are unpalatable to you then try running a Mac & MacOS... Anything but Windows. I really do not reccomend Windows for any type of online transaction involving sensitive information, i.e. credit card numbers, bank accoounts, etc.

One other word. Microsoft's new "Vista" (aka Longhorn)  operating system  is due out next year. Hopefully they'll address some of the gaping security holes found in previous versions of Windows. But I have my doubts, every time a new version of Windows comes out Microsoft brags how 'secure" it will be and look at the results.  Besides, Microsoft has  been so busy making sure that "Vista" is so locked down to suit Hollywood's interests that I doubt they spend much time on security.  meanwhile,  I'll stick to my non-Windows platforms. especially when it comes  to online transactions.

Don,

You mentioned that your email adr was only used for personal emails.

It's like the situation where you're a mob member and have gotten away with many crimes. But then, one of your co workers gets busted and sings like a bird.

I was told by my computer guy that even tho I was careful wid my email adr, it is out there in every adr book I've ever contacted and gets distributed widely by the guys who send around the huge CC lists.   All ya need is one virus, somewhere, sometime, to high jack one of these lists and it has all the adrs.

Web guest lists are a another one that gets mined. And now, I'm getting 'hot stock picks" every day cuz I did a coupla of posts on one of the trading reflectors... ;D

I think the solution is just like a telephone. Give your real number to just a few friends. Use a cell phone for the world. ie, get a few "hot mail" adrs for the web and keep the main adr close to you.  [I shud take my own advice]

T

Apple's Macintosh OS X operating system is another alternative.  It is based in Linux.  I always thought the old Mac OS9 and earlier systems were clunky as hell, and had many of the same problems as Windows, but in many ways OS X is superior to any version of Windows, and not just in the security arena.

I use Windows at home and OS X at work.

Yeah, OS X is more streamined  that older Mac OS's.   Another great operating system(s) were VMS which was run on the VAX and the RSX versions that ran on the PDP-11. VMS was pretty secure and had features that surpass even todays Windows and Unix OS'es. Unfortunately DEC, the corp. who made the VAX had they marekted their products differently may have risen to the top and we might today be using micro versions of the VAX that would have surpassed what we have on most desktops today.

I remember about 20 years ago the local university had a vax mainframe system.  It was a real dinosaur compared with what we have today, but of course, so were the "IBM compatible" home computers of that era.

I had absolutely no interest in computers back then when you had to type in everything line at a time, and one typo would make the whole program crash.  I recall the black screen and green text, but that was actually easier on the eyes than today's displays which try to simulate ink on paper.  With the old green text, the total light input to your eyes was a tiny fraction of what it is with the white background and black text.  Naturally, the printer was something like 7X5 dot matrix.

With the vax system, your personal machine became merely a terminal unit for the mainframe.  Dozens of users could be on at the same time, and it would rapidly shift between users.  The more users on at a given moment, the slower the system ran.

My earliest experiences with computers date back to the early 1970's when I wrote FORTRAN programs on punched cards to be run on an IBM mainframe. At the end of the day, after I had each line of FORTRAN code punched in on it's respective punch card and I had the cards in proper order I submitted them to the "Operations" department. During the night an operator would batch process all the cards. The next morning I'd have my output waiting for me on a big sheet of 132 column greenbar paper.

Technically the VAX was not a mainframe. It was a minicomputer. Usually run in a cluster. The clustering ability of VAX/VMS was incredibly efficient and way ahead of it's time and is unparrallelled even in todays modern world. Today most VAX and alpha users run OpenVMS which supports various graphical user interfaces i.e. X11, XFree86, Motif, etc.  OpenVMD can be had for free these days for non-commercial users.  Yes, belive it or not the VAX / VAXen and alpha systems are still very much alive, although slowly  dying off. However, I have a feeling that they will never die completely. There are a great many hobbyists and enthusiasts engaged in preserving and keeping old computing systems alive. Much like radio guys keep old Johnsons, HeathKits, Collins gear running so are many doing the same with old computers. 

Yep, I remember the old green monchrome CRT terminals  In those days we did virtually everything from the command line.or within the comnand shell of the particular piece of software we were running. Even in todays world of GUI interfaces and managed windows I still like to use  the command line for a lot of things. On Linux it is very easy to access a command line terminal even from within a graphical windowi environment.  Therer are some tasks that are easier and more efficiently done vial the command line. In addition in Unix the command shell langauge (i.e.bash, csh, ksh ,etc...is often quaite a powerful programming langauge in and of itself.

John said:
John, I'm wondering if you still recall the old Tektronix 4014 terminals which had the high persitance phosphrous. When you needed a copy, you would press a button and the screen would be scanned. You would get your copy out of the 4032 copier filled will silver nitrate(?) paper. I worked on them so much I was fixing them in my sleep!

You guys were all pikers...... PDP 8 in time share (thenPDP 11) fed with paper tape from the big green machine.... You would rool up your prg. and unscrew the Kodak 35mm film canister, place the tape inside. no problems to worry about. Pluss you can fill up your coworkers coat pocket with the little holes, or put them in his car floor vent... fun times    klc

I recall a form of hazing back in the 60's that would be played on the newbies, the "chad count."  Machines ran paper tapes punched with holes.  As the machine punched the little holes, about 1/8" in diameter, they left paper chad all over the place, like accumulating snow.

Newbies were told that every piece of chad had to be accounted for, for security reasons.  Guys would actually be down on their hands and knees picking up chad from the floor and putting them in a container, then attempting to count each piece.

Oh yeah, we had one of those in the "computer (terminal)  room at my college where I was  both a student and worked as a user assistant and junior systems operator. We had one of those terminals and it sat in a corner apart from the rest of the standard green CRT terminals and decwriter terminals. I seldom had much opportunity or need to use it but what was really funny was  that sometimes a student would come in and if all the other terminals were occupied would try and use the Tektronix terrminal. And 90% of the time shrotly thereafter the student would come over to us and saysomething like, "hey, you guys, check out that terminal over there, somethings wrong with it, it's bugget out".

I had a chance to run the new computer with the latest Outlook Express. It has a spam capture  program in it.

I didn't have to do any settings or filtering. Outlook created a "spam" file and so far over the last four days I see 29 emails sitting in it. EVERY one was a legit spam and many were those random book passage types. Some were Viagra or Rolex ads and others were hot stock picks.

Not one has sneaked thru into the regular email folder. 

It appears that fuzzy logic programing is getting better these days.  Nice not to see those stupid emails anymore... ;D

T

Wonder if M$ has a downloadable version of that on its site, or at least an upgrade.  Mine  (3 years old) doesn't have that.  I rarely get junk mail thru my Hotmail account since they upgraded  their spam  filter.  But my ISP mail address somehow got into circulation.

Mozilla Thunderbird has bayesian filtering, works very well.

Larry