Getting Viruses sent to me

by SixofNine 4 Replies latest jw friends

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  SixofNine

  Maybe some of you geeks can enlighten me. Lately I've been getting more and more spam, so obviously my e-mail addy has gotten out into the wrong hands. But in the past few days, I've been getting spam with a virus or trojan attached.

  My security software seems to be handling it, but here is what I don't understand: the "sender" in some of these mails will be a name that is an obvious takeoff on, or misspelling of, my name (but is not my name exactly). Is there some technical reason for these hackers to do this, or are they doing it because it might mean a greater chance that I would be curious and open the mail?

  Also, this started happening just after I signed up with "VoipBuster", a company competing with Skype by being cheaper or free. The service seems to work fine. My question is, just how much is an e-mail addy worth? It's not likely that a company that went to the trouble of setting up a working Voip system would be selling my info to hackers, or be hackers themselves, is it?
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  tetrapod.sapien

  hey dude,

  you will see your name in the sender because that is how the particular program that they use sets up the outgoing emails. and yes, it works well. people open the emails AND try to open the attachments. bad users... lol

  and an email address is not worth that much, but it depends on the database they got it from. if they got it from a respectable source, then perhaps it is worth more to them. and it is next to impossible to say who they got your address from. your address could have been sitting in a databse on some *crackers* laptop for 6 months before she got around to using it.

  hope it clears up for you. these cases are so hard to analyze without being right in front of the computer itself.

  tetra
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  SixofNine

  thanks dude. So it isn't a technical reason for the setup of the outgoing mail, it is just a ruse to make people curious, ie: "hah, I'm opening a real mail sent to the wrong addy"?
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  unclebruce

  Oh I thought you meant Mary had been at it again .. sneezing in envelopes before mailing
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  tetrapod.sapien

  So it isn't a technical reason for the setup of the outgoing mail, it is just a ruse to make people curious, ie: "hah, I'm opening a real mail sent to the wrong addy"?

  um, if you are only recieving the emails with the trojans attatched, and the senders are not your exact address, then it is just a technical ploy to get people to read the email.

  you probably know this, but to find out if the email is from your *exact* address or not, you need to look into the details for that specific email. if the sender is an address close to yours, then don't worry about it. if the sender, the real sender, is your exact address, then you have a troijan on your machine already. actually, that is only if you are using an email program that is installed on your computer, like outlook express. if you are using an email program that is on a server somewhere, like gmail or hotmail, then you need to bring the issue to their attention if the real address is your exact address.

  sorry for the wordiness.

  tetra