Email Scams and Address Gatherers

Email Scams



\• Active email addresses are valuable
• Speculative emails gather data on “liveness” of an address
• Lists of mail addresses sold to spammers and scammers











You may not realise it, but your email address is a valuable commodity. Active email addresses
are bought and sold between advertisers and attackers alike, and there are various ways that they
employ to gather these emails. Most simply, they trawl the web, looking for email addresses
on web pages. But as most people are now wise to this and have removed their mail addresses
wherever possible, they have found other ways of gathering addresses.
One method is to guess valid addresses, and send a speculative emails to test whether that address
is active. Often, these mails have embedded HTML code which downloads an image or other
file, which then alerts the attacker that the mail address is active.