bbs.spamgourmet.com

Well, I got my first ever Spamgourmet related spam.

Came to 13.someword.myuser at neverbox.com (originally I forgot to mention the someword and just wrote here 13.myuser).

Why 13 and why neverbox? Kind of scary...

Looks like it could be a truncation of another SG addres. Do you have any other addresses like "someword.13.myusername@neverbox.com" out there? Drop the first word by some software bug, and it's a whole new address.

That's the thing. I don't think I have ever even used a number in my addresses and certainly not 13.

But you just made me realize I was wrong and it used 13.word.myuser. That means 13 was actually the trigger and not the number. "word" was the number and "word" started with "L" (low capital) which stands for "12". I guess I did use this word in the past, but maybe like a year ago. So basically I think it took word.myuser and just added "13." in front of it thus turning "word" from the trigger into the number. Do you still think it's a Spamgourmet specific spam?

Again, the original address must have been:
word.myuser
The spam created address was:
13.word.myuser

Damn, 2 more spams!

This time to:
10.companythatsoldmeout.myuser
10 companythatsoldmeout.myuser

Yes, that's a space in the latter one! How did it even work? Stranger still, Spamgourmet translated the "to" field to 10.companythatsoldmeout.myuser (that is, just like the former address) and wrote in the subject:
Some spam subject (10: message 1 of 12) (10 companythatsoldmeout: message 1 of *my default*)
(It's 12 again because companythatsoldmeout starts with "L")

I only know about the space because unlike the "to" field inside the site it's shown clearly.

Hello,

just wanted to add that one of my already banned email-adresses got hacked this way, too. You can try for yourself just using an existing spamgourmet-email of yours and add e. g.

"20 " (20 space)

in front. Testing this way I got even two emails... Strange thing.

Well, I think the actual problem is, that if you know spamgourmet it is quite easy to hack it: Just change the name in front of the first dot in some way, e. g. by prepending "20 " or I even got mails with "20\n" (i. e. number followed by newline) and such.

If this continues it will be the death of spamgourmet, I think .

I currently don't have an idea how to get around this problem.

Kind Regards,
Thragor

Weird. I wouldn't think a spammer would bother. But we do have prefixes and watchwords we can use, so no real harm done.

The SG address I got hit with was a d f g h dot n e t domain and the evil ones hit by creating two new addrs. They were in the following forms:

10.userid at domain
10.sg.userid at domain

Like lwc above, the subject line additions kind of mislead you as to what the real full address being used was. I did a double take and had to review them carefully. The original base sg.userid is one dedicated to a single yahoo group. When we had the server issue, I moved some of my newsgroup workload over to the German server and it looks like I need to accelerate that effort.

I just shutdown the two new addresses, but It looks like this devil has my name. Time to get another level of sophisication.

But how do they know it's Spamgourmet (otherwise why would they use dots)? Do they know each of its domains or maybe by IP address?

And why do they add the number plus dot before the keyword and not after it?

LowKey wrote:Weird. I wouldn't think a spammer would bother. But we do have prefixes and watchwords we can use, so no real harm done.

Thanks for the hint... (I forgot about that). But I think watchwords (german: Kennworte?) won't work if the spammer works in the suggested way just prepending a number. At least as soon as the spammer gets hold of a mail which contains a watchword.

Prefixes at least would help to block spammers as those mentioned here. I just set one... hopefully I won't forget to set it next time

Kind Regards,
- Thragor

Watchwords are the preferred method -- the prefix is older and still included because some people still use it and swear by it.

The watchwords *will* work if you remember two things:

1) change them every so often. This way, an older address won't provide clues. You can have more than one watchword, obviously, which allows you to phase them in and out, if necessary.

2) if you're geeky like me, realize that you can use regular expression syntax in the watchwords (e.g., ^ means match at the beginning of the "word", $ means match at the end, etc.) - you can come up with approaches that defy any hamhanded approach to overcoming them (but don't get too sophisticated, since you'll have to remember how to make a new address work )

Hey Josh, what about the spaces and what about how do those spammers recognize this service?