email hack

[tim997]

I am starting to receive email from multiple members with the subject line: FW: new message. I realize these are malware containing messages and have never opened one...just delete. I know this happened last year. This is just a heads up for people that may not know. Of interest to me is if anyone has received such an email from my address?

Tim Peterson

[kjr914]

Tim,
You are not alone... If you are on any of the PCA-SDR mailing lists listed on the webpage (example: equipment@pcasdr.org), the spammers found us. I believe some club folks were working on installing spam email filtering late last year when it got bad (and it got better after that). Luckily, yahoo seems to trap most of it for me when it gets to my account.

[marcus981]

Tim,

Thanks for bringing this issue to the attention of club members that might not yet be aware of it.

I did some research on this specific spammer a couple of months ago. It seems that one of Terry Barnum's computers or accounts got compromised, exposing his contacts list which included many personal and work email addresses for club members.

You may notice that the "from name" shows different club member's names for each message, but the "from address" always shows terry@dop.com. The spammer is probably hoping to bait someone to click on their links by trying to use every name in Terry's address book to fool us into thinking the message came from that person.

So far, I don't recall seeing your name on any of them.

Several months ago we installed a spam filter for any email going through pcasdr.org addresses, and it has been catching 99.5% of spam (which is about 100,000 spam messages per month).

Unfortunately, we can't do anything to stop the "FW: new message" emails that are addressed to anything other than pcasdr.org addresses. We're hoping the spammer eventually gives up on sending those.

Marcus