[Corpora-List] Hacked email accounts (Bill Louw)

[Trevor Jenkins]

The From: line in message headers is, like the Subject: line, nothing more than text. It can be changed at will by te message author. The practice is now so common that Google Mail now includes a warning "This address may be fake" on messages proportedly from Gmail accounts that were not sent out through the Gmail web set. There is nothing melicious per se in changing this line but spammers (and viruses) exploit it to hide their own identity and, implicitly, chew up network bandwidth with discussions such as this.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!

Sent from my iPad

On 19 Aug 2011, at 02:05, Alexander Yeh <asy at mitre.org> wrote:

> The email may or may not have come from Bill Louw's account.
> I do know that when I sending emails to somebody in a particular country,
> I start getting spam/scam email from that country (typically in that country's commonly used language). So I have a funny feeling that email fields are often read by people other than the intended recipients.
> I have heard that the "from" field can be faked, at least to a certain extent.
> 
> Hope this helps
> -Alex (spammed in over a dozen different languages, most of which he cannot read)
> 
> Linas Vepstas wrote:
>> I just received a standard email-scam letter from
>> Bill Louw's gmail account, and want to
>> 
>> 1) caution everybody here to take care and not loose
>> money to the scammers
>> 
>> 2) have someone who knows him personally to
>> contact him (by phone, not email!)&  get him
>> to fix/cleanup the email account.
>> 
>> 3) The account is louwbill at gmail.com -- for all I know,
>> that is not even him, but just something faked up!
>> Dunno.
>> 
>> Anyway, beware... and please help/clarify as needed.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> -- Linas
>> 
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