• Re: [OT - ish] Munging Usenet email addresses

    From Theo@21:1/5 to Alan B on Wed Jun 15 10:39:36 2022
    Alan B <[email protected]> wrote:

    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet like they have done traditionally?

    Hard to tell, but I've seen a substantial uptick of late of 'invoice' spam
    to the address I post to Usenet with. Who is to say when they harvested
    that address though.

    According to haveibeenpwned.com, the address is in this breach:

    NemoWeb: In September 2016, almost 21GB of data from the French website used for "standardised and decentralized means of exchange for publishing
    newsgroup articles" NemoWeb was leaked from what appears to have been an unprotected Mongo DB. The data consisted of a large volume of emails sent to the service and included almost 3.5M unique addresses, albeit many of them auto-generated. Multiple attempts were made to contact the operators of
    NemoWeb but no response was received.
    Compromised data: Email addresses, Names


    so it's not just a problem from decades ago. The address I used in the
    early 2000s is in these breaches:

    Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer: In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data.

    Onliner Spambot (spam list): In August 2017, a spambot by the name of
    Onliner Spambot was identified by security researcher Benkow moʞuƎq.

    Verifications.io: In February 2019, the email address validation service verifications.io suffered a data breach.

    which are all recent, even if I haven't used the address for 15 years or
    more.

    Theo

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  • From Alan B@21:1/5 to Theo on Wed Jun 15 09:49:49 2022
    Theo <[email protected]> wrote:
    Alan B <[email protected]> wrote:

    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet >> like they have done traditionally?

    Hard to tell, but I've seen a substantial uptick of late of 'invoice' spam
    to the address I post to Usenet with. Who is to say when they harvested
    that address though.

    According to haveibeenpwned.com, the address is in this breach:

    NemoWeb: In September 2016, almost 21GB of data from the French website used for "standardised and decentralized means of exchange for publishing newsgroup articles" NemoWeb was leaked from what appears to have been an unprotected Mongo DB. The data consisted of a large volume of emails sent to the service and included almost 3.5M unique addresses, albeit many of them auto-generated. Multiple attempts were made to contact the operators of NemoWeb but no response was received.
    Compromised data: Email addresses, Names


    so it's not just a problem from decades ago. The address I used in the
    early 2000s is in these breaches:

    Data Enrichment Exposure From PDL Customer: In October 2019, security researchers Vinny Troia and Bob Diachenko identified an unprotected Elasticsearch server holding 1.2 billion records of personal data.

    Onliner Spambot (spam list): In August 2017, a spambot by the name of
    Onliner Spambot was identified by security researcher Benkow moʞuƎq.

    Verifications.io: In February 2019, the email address validation service verifications.io suffered a data breach.

    which are all recent, even if I haven't used the address for 15 years or more.

    There’s a debate going on at eternal-september.support which has touched on this issue. I get the feeling that Mr Banana is not really in favour on munging. However I won’t make any changes here until I’m told to do so.

    --
    Cheers, Alan

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  • From Alan B@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jun 15 09:29:36 2022
    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet like they have done traditionally?

    --
    Cheers, Alan

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Mike Dee@21:1/5 to Alan B on Thu Jun 16 04:22:13 2022
    Alan B wrote:

    There� Ts a debate going on at eternal-september.support which has
    touched on this issue. I get the feeling that Mr Banana is not
    really in favour on munging. However I won� Tt make any changes
    here until I� Tm told to do so.

    I think it is more to do with some idiot using @eternal-september.org
    as his "munged" email address, rather than Ray Banana not being in
    favour of munged email addresses.

    --
    dee

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  • From Alan B@21:1/5 to Mike Dee on Thu Jun 16 06:00:56 2022
    Mike Dee <[email protected]d> wrote:
    Alan B wrote:

    Thereƒ Ts a debate going on at eternal-september.support which has
    touched on this issue. I get the feeling that Mr Banana is not
    really in favour on munging. However I wonƒ Tt make any changes
    here until Iƒ Tm told to do so.

    I think it is more to do with some idiot using @eternal-september.org
    as his "munged" email address, rather than Ray Banana not being in
    favour of munged email addresses.

    Yes I saw that. That’a very idiotic thing to do. I don’t think I’ll join that discussion though :)

    --
    Cheers, Alan

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  • From Gwyneth Llewelyn@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 3 01:23:42 2022
    On 15 Jun 2022, Alan B wrote
    (in article<t8c8q0$grm$[email protected]>):


    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet like they have done traditionally?

    An excellent question indeed. In my case, so many bots have farmed my email address in the past 15+ years that I frankly don’t care anymore.

    Give those anti-spam mail filters a chance :-)

    More seriously, the main issue these days is identity theft (i.e. sending emails as if they come from you), especially if you’re using your own (school, university, business...) mail server, which may not have adequate protection in place.

    Besides that, well... I’m personally more annoyed by SMS text spam, since there are far less tools that filter those out a priori. Afterwards you can always block the origin, of course.

    Just my, uh, 2 Bitcoin cents.

    - Gwyn

    --

    I'm just a virtual girl in a virtual world.

    My PGP fingerprint: CE8A6006B611850F127572BAD93EAA3DC4B3E1CB

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  • From Joerg Lorenz@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 3 04:41:06 2022
    Am 15.06.22 um 11:29 schrieb Alan B:

    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet like they have done traditionally?

    I'm regular since 2000. Never ever seen any activities. I'm using
    currently Eternal-September as well as Solani and did others in the
    past. My e-mail address is the same for over 20 years. Roughly 1
    Spam-Mail per Week. Max.


    --
    Gutta cavat lapidem (Ovid)

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  • From Alan B@21:1/5 to Gwyneth Llewelyn on Sun Jul 3 07:24:32 2022
    Gwyneth Llewelyn <[email protected]> wrote:
    On 15 Jun 2022, Alan B wrote
    (in article<t8c8q0$grm$[email protected]>):


    Is this still necessary? Are bots still farming email addresses from Usenet >> like they have done traditionally?

    An excellent question indeed. In my case, so many bots have farmed my email address in the past 15+ years that I frankly don’t care anymore.

    Give those anti-spam mail filters a chance :-)

    More seriously, the main issue these days is identity theft (i.e. sending emails as if they come from you), especially if you’re using your own (school, university, business...) mail server, which may not have adequate protection in place.

    Besides that, well... I’m personally more annoyed by SMS text spam, since there are far less tools that filter those out a priori. Afterwards you can always block the origin, of course.

    Just my, uh, 2 Bitcoin cents.

    To be fair I seem to get very little spam email (and SMS) messages. Maybe Google is filtering much of it so I never see it. I may demunge my Usenet email address and see what happens. To repeat my earlier remarks, it isn’t
    my main email address or AppleId so hopefully won’t create any real issues.
    I note that Joerg has had few problems.

    --
    Cheers, Alan

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  • From Joerg Lorenz@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 3 16:21:27 2022
    Am 03.07.22 um 02:23 schrieb Gwyneth Llewelyn:
    Just my, uh, 2 Bitcoin cents.

    I accept only real money with the power of a strong economy behind it
    and not artificial play money.

    - Gwyn

    Jörg


    --
    Gutta cavat lapidem (Ovid)

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