Suddenly getting spam 2 years on.

Hi,

When I was a PN customer I setup 2 mailboxes. They were created on the 8th June 2005 and deleted on the 20th June 2005.

Neither address got used, and I was the only one that knew about them. Around the same time a redirect got setup from another domain PN were hosting to a hotmail.com box.
This also went unused until I left PN in July 2005.

Today, for the first time ever all three addresses have been spammed in the space of half an hour, the 2 mailboxes twice and the redirect 5 times.

Any idea's how on earth this is even possible????

This has been raised to a P1 problem.
It's not just you

We've updated service status here:

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1179090052.htm

As soon as we know more we'll update status.

Thanks for that Dave.
"....unusual patterns of spam emails sent to addresses that they have seen little or no spam on in the past."

What about accounts that have never been ever been used, not known about and only existed for 8 days on the PN servers nearly 2 years ago??
It just doesn't make a great deal of sense in the slightest!!

Edited by deleted (Sun 13-May-07 23:41:11)

I preume the catch-all address still exist and you still use it to collect email from. In which case the spams sent to these two addresses would have been sent to that catch-all address and why you received them.

Why the spams were sent to these particular two addresses I do not personally know right now, there's another customer on the PlusNet forum who saw similar spams sent to mailboxes that were deleted over a year ago.

Could you PM me your username and the mailbox names as it may help us?

Dave,


I stopped being a customer in July 2005

I now run my own mail server now and I was just browsing through the reject logs when I spotted these.


Pete


[Edited for fat fingeredness]

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-May-07 09:01:24)

Dave,

I have started getting these spam emails and the thing they all have in common is that they are alternate email addresses setup in WebMail (Ticket #21888889) and not randomly generated.

Regards,

Mark

I have been extremely careful to not give my PN address to anybody bar around two people.

I have had the address for four years and never once got spam, until yesterday.

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-May-07 09:19:18)

I just checked and noticed this too, I have one address set up in webmail which I only ever used once for a job application years ago on my CV, I never even recieved any mail to that address.

I suspect somebody has bypassed Plusnet's security and got hold of a list of addresses, there is absolutely no other way this address would be known apart from an internal security breach.

Same here. I have started getting spam at an email address (not hosted by PlusNet) that I gave when I registered as a customer of PlusNet's free service. PlusNet are the only ones that I have given that address to. This implies a security lapse at PlusNet.

The unfortunate thing is that it seems that contacts stored in PlusNet webmail address books have also started receiving spam recently, when they never received spam before. Unless this is a strange coincidence, PlusNet could be responsible for revealing other people's email addresses to spammers. Even those who have nothing to do with PlusNet have started receiving spam possibly as a result of PlusNet's security lapse.

Shouldn't this kind of thing be investigated by Ofcom?