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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Have you ever looked into the average email inbox? 99% of bad actors are simply casting a net as wide as they can to find the most gullible people.
Targeted, specialized attacks are rare.
It could've been email spoofing[1], where the attacker sends an email with a worm and makes it look like it was sent from a friend. Once the email is opened by the recipient, the worm sends a similar email to the recipient's contacts, which continues to spread the spam.
This reminds me of way back in 2004 when someone at AOL sold off a bunch of emails/users. I had an impossible to guess username/email (looked something like cdyskdjfslkjdf112) and I suddenly started getting spam/phishing emails one day and had no idea how that could happen.
Haha sounds like fun! I need to dive into that more. Maybe for the next iteration of our website.
I tried emailing a few of these accounts from a burner email and got bounce backs on all of them.
Also just realized that since 12-15 another IP address 35.238.7.76 has submitted 4 more jibberish email accounts like uxjzylbwryxb@gmail.com.
So if they are fake accounts that bounce back, I guess that could hurt my deliverability rates with Constant Contact - not sure though. In any case I haven't been uploading them to my email contacts list so if he is trying to hurt my account it's been totally ineffective. And he'll need to increase his number of submissions by a few orders of magnitude to make a difference in the costs.
I guess my next step would have to be figuring out how to block multiple submissions from the same IP address or just reaching out to this dude and asking what's up. I need to learn more about him first since he works for someone kinda influential in my industry.
First of all, you believe the spammer. You played along and then you played yourself. Just don't believe anything the spammer said is genuine.
Secondly, I think we've all been wondering that since email has become a thing, right? This kind of behavior will continue as long as people play along and as long as everyone is on the internet someone will play along.
This kinda stuff is why I don't like catchall email accounts.
IANAL...but there can be some legal exposure here, too. Mr. Bad Actor is up to shady sh*t, using a fake bactor@YourDomain.com account as part of that, and some less-than-friendly Feds (or lawyer for a victim, or ...) could be knocking on your door.
Yes, fake-account and typo'ed -address email can be kinda entertaining to read. But better to lose no time, need no lawyer, set things to auto-bounce with a "No Such Account" error, and keep email logs for ~3 months or so - to play the random clueless honest bystander part.
People had claimed their own email address had been used to post a message. The messages themselves were repetitive and clearly had generated names. Someone ran the entire thing through and reduced the bulk messages down to a handful. I believe there were some attempts to add filler words, but for the most part someone just put together spam bots.
You know what it might be: maybe the person is a niche marketer and is going to pretend to be multiple people to sell their product to the newsletter's audience. That happens all the time. Account 1 will ask for recommendations, then account 2-6, all held by the same person, talks up the spammer's product. Although, I don't know exactly how it would work with a newsletter, I know this is very common when comment spamming.
https://www.spamhero.com/support/125230/I_am_being_attacked_...
I use to work on a newsletter service and we had to combat this constantly.
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