I keep getting auto-responces for emails sent from my company email, but the thing is, I am not sending them. I have a net that catches any emails sent to my domain. So people are using things like
[email protected] to send spam. Is there anything I can do about it?
1. Don't use catch-all forwarding to give yourself multiple addresses going to one email account, use multiple email accounts for multiple addresses, or multiple email forwards. Catch-all forwarding will only end up giving you multiple spam.
2. Catch-all should be disabled, and disabled in a way that preferably does not bounce spam emails, otherwise you are doing exactly what the spammers want you to do, i.e. helping them distribute spam via
bounce back or backscatter.
3. To minimise the chance of being a victim of spam, make use of other
spam prevention techniques.
4. Keep aware of what is going on in the world of spammers, (it doesn't make for a comfortable read, and we have experienced this first hand earlier this week with a serious spike of botnet spam activity sending spam to domains on our server) e.g.:
a. BBC Click video (March 2009) about the botnets at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7932816.stm
b. Botnet article links:
www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/23/botnet_speed_test/
www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187675
www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/16/new_ibotnet_analysis
c. This month's Symantic Internet Threat report says that spam volumes
trebled last year and botnets now account for 90% of spam:
www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/14/symantec_threat_report
d. This article is from Jan 2009 and reports on one particular botnet as
having infected 10 million PCs at that time and growing at 1 million a week:
http://cyberinsecure.com/spam-volum...least-10-millions-of-infected-conficker-bots/
"Latest educated guess of the size of the botnet is 10m strong as of
Friday, 23 January, 1m up on the 9 million of the week before."
Other interesting notes:
"Some countries are being more heavily hit by the zombie epidemic.
China, Russia and Brazil account for 41 per cent of infected IP addresses"
"The spam run seeks to promote websites while also seeking to validate
email addresses for later, possibly more insidious, junk mail runs."
