Oh yeah, we got a bunch in our normal e-mail routing, plus quite a few into the Sales e-mail address posted on our website. And a couple of our suppliers are down too today because of it.
And Shib that’s great. I’m singing it now to my IT guys.
Yeppers, and its good to know its not just me. I was really quite confused. I’m racking my brain wondering who the hell I pissed of in Germany. I may take some of this stuff to one of those german to english translator sites and see what exactly I’m getting spammed for. The other strange thing is that I’m getting it at a fairly private work only email.
I’ve gotten 4 or 5 of those messages at my gmail account, where I rarely get spam. Worse yet, gmail’s spam filter isn’t catching them.
Not happening to me here in the UK - I have 3 different e-mail accounts, one based in Ireland, and am only receiving the usual trickle of spam.
I’ve gotten 30 or so since last night at my school address, which I’ve never used for any message boards. They seem to use consistent phrases though, so it’s been easy to update my filters.
From: tloftus@whalen.com
To: DCCDONNA@yahoo.com
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 05:40:54 UTC
Subject: Auslaender bevorzugt
From: youngfm1220@aol.com
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 11:53:36 UTC
Subject: Schily ueber Deutschland
Something about cellphones and drugs for Knacki’s arrival - but I didn’t follow the links. I assumed they were a result of looking up relatives on some .de sites - but admittedly, they’re are the only 2 unsolicited german emails I ever recall hitting my inbox.
I just got one, it was a bounceback error, as if I had tried to send something to someone that didn’t get through.
p.s. – it was at my work email address, where we have excellent spam filtering (except for this).
I’ve also been getting a ton of German spam in the past couple of days, and I’ve been getting a few “Horseshoe D. Fabulous”-type spams per week for a couple of months now. All in my university-assigned e-mail address, which I almost never give out on the Internet.
My SDMB e-mail address is unscathed by this recent barrage.
Yeah, we’re getting those too. Our IT guys are pretty sure it’s all linked together. And they’re positive it’s that version of the Sober virus that Skip linked to.
From my IT department in the USA:
“As most of you are aware from the evidence in your in-boxes, there has been a rash of messages sent to people around the school where the subject and body are both written in German containing at least one link to a news article on a website somewhere in Germany. These messages seem to be the latest use of a spam zombie (a zombie is a computer infected with a virus that waits for a “go” signal from someone, somewhere to start misbehaving) to not sell ink cartridges, male enhancement products or mortgage loans but rather to put forth a political agenda. The good news is that while these messages have proven to be numerous, they are no more harmful than any other form of spam – at least from a computer standpoint; I make no claim as to the destructiveness of the political opinions contained therein. John Schmid stopped by on his day off (yay, John!) to manually enter a rule into our spam evaluation software on the e-mail servers such that messages of this nature should now be labeled with the usual [SPAM] in the subject field. You may handle them as you do any spam message you receive.
There is one side-effect that I need to mention, though. Since this spam is created by a virus on someone’s computer (no one here at Pitt – at least not so far) it transmits its messages using a spoofed sender. In other words, the virus has a list of e-mail addresses (some real, some made up) that it uses to both populate the From: field of the message as well as the To: field. Since some Katz e-mail addresses are in this list, you may see bounce back messages from other e-mail services claiming that a message of this nature was undeliverable. The original message was not sent from your account or your computer, but merely from the virus using your e-mail address to mask itself. You should delete these messages as well.”
Pretty much explains it.
-Tcat
Yes, I’ve gotten about 80 pieces of German spam to my work e-mail, which is not my e-mail address of record here.
Whew. I thought it was just me.
No German spam, but Prince Ed Bahir Fasheyiky has implored me to “HELP SAVE SOULS” in a bogus tsunami relief scam…
And Julie keeps asking me to look at her webcam. She’s very persistent about it, too. :rolleyes: 
In case anyone is interested in the content:
The first one says “Now you know how the weapons, drugs and cell phones end up in the inmates hands” and links to the NPD, a rightwing extremist party that was on the verge of being banned but escaped because of severe intelligence failures. Their site seems to be down so I couldn’t read the full article, but I doubt that we miss much.
The second one links to an article by Heise, an ordinary IT-centered publisher, which reports that the German Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, plans to strengthen the Federal Office for Security in Information Technology and use it more actively in the fight against terror etc. (poor man’s NSA)
I had a couple of these in my inbox when I checked my email this morning, too.
Here’s a Washington Post article (registration required) about them.
I didn’t receive any, which is really odd - I own a lot of .de (top level domain for Germany) domains the webmaster@… etc. addresses of which receive some 17,000 spam mails per month between them. But hardly any German-language spam among last week’s crop that I just browsed in my spam folder, and what German-language spam there is mainly seems to be clumsily translated from English. No sign of these political subjects. Just the usual fare inviting me to lose inches, gain inches, buy fake Rolexes etc.
… after reading some recent “failure notice” mails I noticed: they did worse - they spoofed an a contact e-mail address from a local party site (Social Democratic Party) that I administer as the From: address for some of these mails. If enough recipients are unaware that sender e-mail addresses can be spoofed I need asbestos underwear tomorrow (today is a public holiday in Germany) 
Yes, everyone in the office had lots of messages yesterday (Monday) morning, and they’re all there again this morning (Tuesday).
I just received one in my non-SDMB box.
Deleted it, & all other non-english e-mails.
Here’s the story in Information Week. No registration required on this one.
There are several stories in the Sci/Tech section of Google News.
GT
Linky-poo no work.
