I just got a bizarre email in my gmail account. It says it’s from ‘me’ - I have my own email in my address book that way for convienance - but I certainly didn’t send it. The subject line is “1545453” sans quotes. The only body text is “969” (again, no quotes).
So: what in the world is going on? Of course the first thing I did was change my account password, but the curiosity remains. I have no idea how to make sense of the header, which means I’m not going to post it here because I don’t know if there’s Secret Private Stuff in that mess. Can someone give me a clue?
Your account hasn’t been hacked. The e-mail standard is inherently insecure and allows spoofing. This means that the e-mail has a system address that tells it where it needs to go but it also has human readable To: and From: elements. These can be spoofed to anything very easily. In the early days of the web, there used to be sites that would allow you to type in e-mail messages from anyone. I had some (sick) fun sending e-mails from bosses to employees, schools, to students etc. You can still do that and spammers decide to do it for whatever reason sometimes. It doesn’t mean much. The technique to do that is easy and impersonal.
I used to get emails that attempted to be excerpts from potboiler novels, or so they seemed. The sentences were more or less grammatical, but overall they were incoherent.
Things like:
“Donovan gave the galvinized soup a review, while the high-wire train wanted more than new batteries. Sheila’s call pushed the ratchet, and she waited for the extra tax…”
Strangely enough, i received a very similar email today. With a subject line of “455” and a body of “969”. It was rather bizarre. I was confused why someone would do such a thing, but then i thought maybe it was a newbie spammer trying out his list.
One thing nobody’s mentioned: a number of trojans use infected systems to send spam, spoofing the return address using random e-mails from the infected system’s address book. So, there’s a significant possibility that this means a computer belonging to someone you know is compromised. A successful trace of the actual sender might help you help a friend clear their system … But that would be hard, unlikely to be successful, and anyway, it’s not your system that’s infected. If you have a good idea who all likely has your e-mail in their address books, you might find it in your heart to send out a note, especially to anyone who you know is likely to not have good security tech, and recommend they get some.
If you have a good idea who all likely has your e-mail in their address books, you might find it in your heart to send out a note, especially to anyone who you know is likely to not have good security tech, and recommend they get some.