I'm reading the transcript of the video and he talks about a form of attack where fake emails are sent from spoofy addresses demanding positive review takedowns and making legal threats. I wonder if that's a possible explanation of the life shield email he got.
In the seomoz article find "It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails" to get to the relevant part.
Sounds like the fake emails were from "subscription bombs". Bad actors will bulk sign up targets to flood their inboxes and hide worrying notifications like security alerts.
it seemed to be part of some larger 'communication and marketing' package he was subscribed to. I was getting monthly email updates, etc - ghostwritten by someone else. It wasn't bad, but video responses to everything was annoying. It felt like he was intentionally trying to hide something.
That's a pretty nasty email; I initially thought this was some kind of bizarre targeted spam, until they started talking about the coding stuff and it made me realize "nope, a human wrote this".
I don't think I've ever received anything this horrible ever; when I was attempting to make videos on early (~2008) YouTube as a teenager, I definitely got a lot of death threats though, so much so that someone made a whole-ass video threatening to kick my ass because they thought I said something bad about people in wheelchairs (I did not, I genuinely have no idea how they even came to that conclusion).
The internet is simultaneously the best and worst invention that humans have ever made. It allows people to be their true selves, for all that entails.
Yes, this is a real problem. But the text of the email makes it seem the author was a target of some troll attack. The names do not look real on gmail (Diego jewstein ???) and the text is very llm’ish.
I worry that someone may be trying to incorporate a sophisticated supply chain attack. Step 1. Troll maintainers, Step 2. Find someone to maintain who can accept malicious code. Step 3. Track where this goes
It's also possible that the spam email came from a computer infected with malware, making the target of this "attack" an innocent bystander.
Whether this was the case, in this instance, is insignificant, it's just one of those things that the author didn't think of, it shows the author did not think very deeply about the situation, and simply wanted to flex his technical jock.
I don't know what happened in this case, but it's entirely possible that someone who wanted to bring them down organized some bot traffic to them.
It happens for much smaller mailing lists with far fewer enemies where attackers just sign up with trash email addresses in order to increase the chance of your mailing list to be flagged as a spammer account.
His explanation for that is the definition of "email" by wikipedia is wrong, and only him know the right one.
I'm not sure what seem worse : He using trolling tactics and expecting people to buy it, or him being so caught up in his own redefinition of reality he now believe it...
Apparently they have IRC logs of him first talking about selling the information to spammers or using it to go phishing, which makes it a little worse.
In the seomoz article find "It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails" to get to the relevant part.
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